The Cricklewood Greats

This is a repost: but this evening BBC4 just repeated its wonderful spoof documentary The Cricklewood Greats ...

Peter Capaldi embarks upon a personal journey to discover the shocking history of the stars of north London's famous film studios. Including clips from rarely seen films and interviews with Marcia Warren and Terry Gilliam.

... a graphically and textually brilliant pastiche, written by Peter Capaldi and Tony Roche, telling the century-long history of a small London studio.

Fake Topsham on Mystery Map

The ITV two-part programme Mystery Map aired recently: see Mystery Map: Ben Shephard and Julia Bradbury talk ghosts, UFOs and weird happenings. The second episode looked potentially of interest, as it covered the mystery of the "Devil's footprints" incident of 1855. The account, however, was very cursory. It was filmed in part by the River Exe in Topsham, using fake snow in Topsham Museum's garden to attempt to recreate the horseshoe-like prints. The snow, however, wasn't the only thing that was fake; I'm sure I'm not the only viewer to be puzzled by the shots of this location visited by Julia Bradbury and identified as Topsham:

""the village church of Topsham, in Devon"

"the church at the heart of sleepy Topsham"

Anyone who lives here will immediately spot it's not Topsham. Despite superficial similarity, Topsham church (St Margaret's) looks like this, with the tower on the side, not the end:

St Margaret's Church, Topsham. Image by David M Lear, licensed for reuse
under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

The church featured in Mystery Map is actually that of the nearby village Clyst St George. See Google Maps:

View Larger Map

Whatever the reason (filming permission issues? Wanting the location to look more folksy? Sheer poor research?) it was lazy and unprofessional of the programme-makers to make this substitution without explanation. For readers in the UK ITV region, the relevant episode of Mystery Map can be seen on ITV Player until around Dec 27th; the Devil's Footprints section is in the third segment.

Screen shots reproduced as fair use for the purposes of criticism and review.

- Ray

SF on YouTube

Just a few things that caught my attention recently: there is some rather good SF on YouTube. First, Крепость (Fortress) aka Ten years from the beginning of the last war: a Russian animation. It has rather the style of 1950s SF: hardware that's  modernised Cold War style rather than an extrapolation of the present day. But the story still works.


You can get brief English captioning if you click the leftmost of the icons at the lower right of the video, but it's not necessary to the understanding of the animation. I see the Russian commenters to the video know their literature: one has quoted the Russian translation of  Sara Teasdale's There Will Come Soft Rains.

And then there's Tears of Steel, the fourth movie from the Blender Foundation, which develops high-quality animations based on crowdsourcing work with open source software (I previously featured the very moving Sintel).


Spoiler (mouseover whited-out paragraph to read):
If you didn't get this, it starts with a couple who split up on a bridge in Amsterdam because the man is bothered by the woman's robot arm. 40 years later, it appears that bitterness over the split caused the woman - Celia - to turn to the dark side of robotics, leading to a post-apocalyptic world dominated by killer robots. A team of scientists has obtained Celia's brain, the prototype for the robots' programming, and is running a simulation with Celia's now middle-aged ex, to try to find an approach that will placate the robots. The story ends in a ruined Amsterdam, with the outcome uncertain: the plan has been successful with one robot, but it's unclear what the others are going to do.

And thirdly, there's Total Recall 2070.See the trailer:



This is a Canadian SF series first broadcast in 1999 (see Wikipedia) that's more or less a cross between the worlds of Total Recall and Blade Runner. It's an eclectic mix of SF tropes from these and many other sources: impetuous film noir detective with geeky oddball partner (who turns out to be an android); sinister corporations; alien DNA; computer viruses; androids wanting to be more human; androids seeking their maker; murder by genetically-engineered diseases; virtual reality technology; and so on. But despite its being derivative in so many ways, it's very watchable, and the whole series is available on YouTube: see the YouTube channel TotalRecall2070.

- Ray

Frank Herbert's Dune

trailer for Frank Herbert's Dune

I mentioned my liking for Dune - both the book and the 1984 David Lynch movie - a while back (see Dune, 10 October 2008). But for some reason, I only just got around to watching the 2000 TV mini-series, Frank Herbert's Dune. It's excellent.

Although the Lynch film is very watchable, it brings in a number of innovations (for instance, the decision to change the novel's "weirding way" from a martial art to a sonic weapon technology); a lot of general exaggerations for cinematic impact (I recall way back seeing ridicule of the portrayal of the villain, Baron Harkonnen, as "a bubonic buggering balloon buffoon"); and, more insidiously, altering Frank Herbert's message - "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes" - into an ending that treats Paul Muad'Dib's heroic, even Messianic, status as a good outcome.

As described in this article - DUNE: Remaking the Classic Novel ("Executive producer Richard Rubinstein and director John Harrison discuss creating the new mini-series") - the mini-series came about because the executive producer, Richard Rubinstein, found that Dino De Laurentis had not acquired the TV rights. Harrison went back to source. There are some additions that he put in to emphasise aspects of the book that he thought Herbert conveyed too subtly - such as the central role of the unseen narrator, Princess Irulan, in the politics of the Dune universe - but it sticks pretty faithfully to the novel's text and spirit. The whole production, filmed with an international cast, largely on studio sets in Prague, looks very good, with interesting costumes ranging between Expressionist and mediaeval in style. It portrays the Harkonnens as they are in the book: vicious and decadent, but not the ridiculous grotesques of the Lynch film. And, nicely, it doesn't neglect the water rituals and cultural quirks of Arrakis.

If you haven't seen the mini-series, it's worth checking out. It probably shouldn't be on YouTube, but it is: Part 1 (2:47) / Part 2 (1:57).

- Ray

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

If you didn't see the program and are in the UK, the 94-minute fact-based drama The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is worth checking out on ITV Player (it's available for 30 days from the broadcast date, 25th April).

It's based on Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House, which tells in novelised format the true story of the investigation of a notorious child murder in 1860s Wiltshire. Here's the offficial site: www.mrwhicher.com.

In June 1860, Francis Savill Kent, the 3-year-old son of a respectable family in Road (now Rode) near Frome, was found stabbed to death in the privy outside their home. Local police having failed to find the murderer, national outcry led to the talented Scotland Yard detective Jonathan ("Jack") Whicher being assigned to the case. Whicher strongly suspected Constance Kent, Savill's 16-year-old half-sister, and her brother William of murdering Savill out of half-sibling resentment. He had Constance arrested, but the case collapsed on lack of evidence, and he was pensioned off in disgrace with "mental depression arising from congestion of the brain". Five years later, however, Constance got religion and confessed to the crime. She received a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment, and was released in 1885. She emigrated to Australia, joining William (who became an eminent marine biologist), and lived the remainder of her life as a respected nurse, dying aged 100 in 1944.

The drama conveys very well the frustrations of police work in an era before forensics and in a community where social hierarchies conspired to prevent unbiased investigation. As the Metropolitan Police Service account puts it - see Constance Kent and the Road Hill House Murder -

It is a classic illustration of how early investigations were directed heavily by magistrates, of the influence which well-to-do people could exert over local police officers, and of the importance of immediately searching and questioning the whole household at the scene of a crime, regardless of social status.

Then, as now, the public were horrified by child murder and wanted a result, but equally horrified by Whicher's then-unprecedented detective investigation of the Kent family (he evidently understood the unpalatable reality that family members are, with statistical justification, the prime suspects for child murders). Viewed purely as a drama, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher had strong resonances with Priestley's An Inspector Calls, with its unpicking of conflicts within a middle-class family with zero end result except their traumatic self-knowledge.  Kate Summerscale - see the September 2008 Bookslut interview - further likens it to The Turn of the Screw (the TV adaptation strongly focusing on the theory that Constance and William Kent committed the crime together).

As the Wikipedia page for Constance Kent says, the Road Hill House case impinged on major issues including Priest-penitent privilege in England. The 1865 vindication was too late to save Whicher's police career, but he became a successful private investigator. A friend of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, he was the prototype for "Sergeant Witchem" in a number of Dickens crime stories such as The Artful Touch, and "Sergeant Cuff" in the 1868 The Moonstone (see p139, Reassessing British literature, 2007). Elements of the Kent case also featured in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1862 Lady Audley's Secret. For other connections, see The prince of sleuths (Kate Summerscale, The Guardian, 5 April 2008).

- Ray

Necropolis Railway revisited

Worth watching, if you're in the UK: the second series of the BBC2 documentary series Great British Railway Journeys (see the list of upcoming episodes).

Today's episode - Waterloo to Canary Wharf - was fun: presenter Michael Portillo interviewed the author Andrew Martin on the Brookwood Necropolis Railway (nicknamed by railway workers "the Stiffs' express") that ran funeral trains from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery until the terminus was bombed in 1941. It's central to one of Martin's London-based crime novels, The Necropolis Railway - see the 2002 Guardian review. The episode further explores London's railway heritage - from the great 19th shopping centre of the West End to the now-largely-defunct docks - via Bradshaw. It's available on BBC iPlayer for 17 days from now.

Of interest, the Leisure Hour magazine (page 346, Volume 5, 1856) has a brief contemporary account of the workings of the Necropolis Company, which was established in 1854 to provide out-of-city burials to alleviate pressure on London's overcrowded cemeteries.

Cognizant of, and recognising these enlightened principles ; fully aware that unless the question of extramural burial for a vast metropolis like London were taken upon the basis of a wide generalization, ultimate failure must ensue; the Necropolis Company bound itself most liberally in its act of incorporation, to single interments in each grave; it selected and purchased a vast extent, namely, two thousand one hundred acres of valuable and most appropriate land, at such a distance from town as combined accessibility with due remoteness; it organized an inclusive plan of burial charges, optional as to adoption, but enormously reducing cost; it issued a scale of tariffs suitable to the means of all classes; it made arrangements with the South-Westerri Railway Company for the conveyance of the dead to the outskirts of its Cemetery; it erected a special station entirely for its own use in the Westminster Road; and, at the close of 1854, the Cemetery was consecrated and brought into use.

An archway of variegated brickwork lends from the Westminster Road into the station of the Necropolis Company. It was built from a design of Sir William Cubitt, and the shafts and curve of the light Norman arch brings to mind a similar one of great beauty in the choir of St. Bartholomcw-the-Great in Smithfield. From thence the narrow roadway, descending for some space between high walls, or rather sides of buildings on either side, brings hearses, carriages, and those on foot, on to the wide pavement of the station. This occupies one side only, the other being bound by the lofty buildings of the Westminster Bridge station of the South-Wcstern Railway. Across this pavement, which is as scrupulously bright and clean as a cathedral floor, the dead are lifted from their respective hearses into the seclusion of places purposely provided; and the vehicles drive on to the gate of exit at the further end. On to this pavement, or platform, many office windows look, some of them made cheerful by bright-flowered plants. On this level are the range of third class waitingrooms, well and appropriately furnished. A massive and handsome staircase of stone leads to the next floor, which is devoted to the use of second class funerals; it thence ascends to the third floor, level with the railway platform, and on which fie the first class reception and waiting-rooms. With the most trifling difference, the various class rooms aro furnished precisely alike: to the honour of the Necropolis Company, it has been the first to strip the necessary ceremonies annexed to death and the grave of an invidious distinction of rank. There is the same privacy, the same quietude, the same respect for poor as well as rich. The remains of "the weak and lowly " are honoured as well as those who, in the beautiful words of old Sir Thomas Browne, " are pompous even in the grave."

If the sun be shining, it pours down through the lofty glass roof; it lies upon the wide and spotless pavement; it lights the pleasant windows of rooms and offices; it rests on planks and flowers upon the window-ledges; it casts no shadow on the massive tender, waiting to convey the dead: nor on carriages that may convey the most touchingand profound of human grief.

The dead are received at the Necropolis Station the night.previous to interment, but for no longer period. The Company intended otherwise. It proposed to bring into force, as far as a public body might, advantages similar to those belonging to the German reception-houses; but the intention met with parochial opposition, and Bo for the present it rests. But ultimately there is little fear that this and other advances will rise superior to the objections of prejudice and unreflecting affection. The coffins are conveyed by a steam-lift to the second and upper floors, according to the class of funeral; ultimately all are conveyed to the level of the railway by the same process. Then, with the utmost privacy and dispatch, the massive tender receives its load, each coffin having a distinct and separate compartment; the steam and other carriages arc attached, the whole go slowly a little way, till out of the precincts of the Necropolis Company; they then reach the line of the South-Western Railway, are attached to an express train, and are off with the speed of the winds.

Google Books has a few dozen more accounts from the same period shortly after the railway's launch: an especially complete one is The After City: a visit to the London Necropolis in The Ladies' Companion and Monthly Magazine, Volume IX, 1856.

See also: Trains in Literature, where I briefly mentioned the topic a couple of years back.

- Ray

Ghost stories for Christmas

You have to wonder if Western Morning News photographer Richard Austin would have been quite so keen to capture images of world famous giant stags had he ever read William Shakespeare's famous words…

Oft have you heard since Herne the hunter dyed,
That women, to affright their little children,
Says that he walkes in shape of a great stagge.

So begins Martin Hesp's story in the Western Morning News today, An Exmoor stag ghost story for Christmas, inspired by the strange media tale of the "Emperor of Exmoor". This, widely reported a couple of months ago, was the contentious story that Britain's largest wild animal had been shot by a trophy hunter. But, as John Vidal told in the Observer - see Dead or alive? The Emperor becomes an Exmoor legend - it gradually became evident that there was little evidence for the story, or even the Emperor's existence.

On the subject of ghost stories, I'm pleased to see that BBC is returning to its tradition of a Christmas Eve ghost story with the showing of a new adaptation of MR James's Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad:

A chilling new single drama, Whistle and I'll Come to You is the thoroughly modern re-working of the evocative Edwardian ghost story Oh, Whistle and I'll come to You, My Lad by MR James, adapted for BBC Two by Neil Cross. Cross's adaptation delves into themes of ageing, hubris and the supernatural, with a horrifying psychological twist in the tale.

James Parkin has just left his wife in the care of a nursing home. Pensive and emotional, he travels to their old favourite destination for rambling, an off-season British seaside town. There he encounters an apparition on a desolate beach, which begins to haunt him - with terrifying consequences.

Details at the BBC2 website, where for UK visitors it's on iPlayer for six days from now.  (Update: I just watched it, and it's a very good reworking.  According to the Kent Film Office, the beach scenes below the chalk cliffs were at Botany Bay and Kingsgate Bay; the external locations for the hotel where Parkin stays were here.  The dune locations appear to be elsewhere: Camber Sands in East Sussex).

If this leaves you with a taste for more MR James ghost stories, many of the classic TV adaptations - A Ghost Story for Christmas - are on YouTube: Number 13 is a good entry point.

- Ray

Goold Macbeth on BBC4

Yesterday I watched the television adaptation of Rupert Goold's Macbeth (BBC4, 12th December, 2010, with Sir Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood in the lead roles - see TV blog). This ran to good reviews from its original at Chichester Festival Theatre, via the West End, to Broadway. Filmed in the subterranean rooms and tunnels of Welbeck Abbey 1, it takes the play into an Eastern European warzone, with explicit resonances between Macbeth and Stalin (alluding, for instance, to the episode when Stalin forced the portly Kruschev to dance the strenuous gopak - "When Stalin says, 'Dance!', a wise man dances") . The witches become malign nurses involved in necromancy (the wounded soldier at the beginning of the play becomes their victim); the moving of Birnam wood becomes soldiers in ghillie suit camouflage.

It was superb: watch it if you haven't already. As Simon Horsford's preview in the Telegraph says:

It is the perfect riposte to cynics who argue that Shakespeare’s plays demand the intimacy of a theatre

and I've taken this view for a long time. Much as I appreciate that many people enjoy theatre, I find cinema and television a superior medium for Shakespeare. This may not apply to small and intimate productions where the audience is, effectively, inside the action, but I really can't see how sitting in a large auditorium watching from one (often distant) viewpoint can compare to the director's tightly-managed control of every nuance of the experience - viewpoint, sound, visual effects and location - that film and TV offer.

If you have access to BBC iPlayer content, Macbeth is available until 9.59pm on Sunday, 19 December.  US readers I think can watch it at PBS Video.

1. The home of the 5th Duke of Portland, whose subterranean obsession inspired Mick Jackson's novel The Underground Man.

- Ray

Sherlock: first series ends

Further to my Sherlock recommendation, the BBC three-part introductory series ended today. This episode, The Great Game, is now on BBC iPlayer, and I repeat the recommendation.

The middle episode, The Blind Banker, I thought was somewhat lame - a rather hackneyed chase-capture-fight-escape story - but The Great Game was well back on form. It pitted Holmes and Watson against a series of lethal puzzles set by a criminal mastermind (a structure reminiscent of Die Hard With a Vengeance) but got back to its Conan Doyle roots with close allusion to The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans; Holmes's classic exposition in A Study in Scarlet of how he keeps his mind free of clutter; his wall-shooting practice as mentioned at the beginning of The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual; a reference to The Five Orange Pips; and even a homage to Rondo Hatton and the Basil Rathbone film The Pearl of Death.

There's a brief review (mild spoilers) at the Guardian TV & Radio blog: Sherlock finale: your verdict on The Great Game.

- Ray

Sherlock

If you didn't see it, the first episode of the new BBC1 series Sherlock is now available on BBC iPlayer. I rather expected this modern reworking of the Sherlock Holmes mythos to be good, given the writers behind it (Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss), but it was well up to expectations.

Today's episode, A Study in Pink, was loosely based on Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, in which Holmes and Watson (played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman) first meet. It managed to faithfully retain many aspects of the original - for example, London still has cabs, and Watson is still an Afghanistan veteran - while using up-to-the-minute phone and Internet technology, and modern perceptions of the characters. Holmes naturally has a website and Watson blogs: the personalities of both are shown as damaged, Watson with PTSD and Holmes described as "a high-functioning sociopath". It's not, however, plain grim but full of witty touches, such as when Holmes (updated to a modern non-smoking ethos) refers to "a three-patch problem". It was nicely filmed - Gatiss says in the Guardian feature that they tried to make modern London "just as exciting as a London full of fog and hackney carriages" - using presentational innovations such as on-screen text and graphics to show phone messages, Holmes's deductions on looking at a corpse, and the route of a chase; these didn't jar in the least. Moffat and Gatiss know their mythos intimately, finding interesting ways to spin some trivia (for instancem, Conan Doyle's inconsistent detail of where Watson was shot) and brought in some pleasant allusions to other works such as The Princess Bride and The Vanishing.

Altogether recommended.

PS Further reading. See Wikipedia: A Study in Scarlet This is the kind of topic that Wikipedia does well. As I just said to Felix in the comments, I know A Study in Scarlet but have completely blanked the middle section with its excursion to Utah and its lurid Mormon plot (a point of controversy in its time).

This is also a good excuse to recommend again Neil Gaiman's rather excellent A Study in Emerald, in which an ex-soldier who has been injured in Afghanistan teams up with a brilliant detective to solve a murder.

- Ray

Maori, Mac Cruislig and Mirab

I thought I'd written about this here before, but no. Above, a trio of pleasant miniature books in Reed's Lilliput series published in 1963 by the New Zealand non-fiction publisher A. H. and A. W. Reed (now a Penguin imprint called Raupo Publishing - a name change to the Maori for "reed" to avoid legal clashes with Reed Elsevier). One's a Maori-English dictionary, one lists Maori placenames, and one lists Maori proverbs.

Bibliographic curiosity apart, I was struck particularly by the strangeness of proverb and idiom in the third book; a large number of the sayings (whakatauki) are rooted in placename, personal or mythological references that are impossible for an outsider to deduce. Some are explicable; some not. "The ear-lobes of Rotu" = we've got nothing for you to eat (i.e. in Rotorua we've no food to offer unless we cut off our ears for you). "So you are rushing off to Orutai!" = you're getting thinner (Orutai being a place that had suffered from famine). "Climbing the mountain of Ruhaine" = growing older. "The fine weather of Hewa" = a state of inner anxiety when things appear outwardly normal. "The plug of Taumarere has come out" = it's crowded here. "The fine weather of Ruhi is spread everywhere" = peace prevails.

Paul Moon, in Traditional Maori Proverbs: Some General Themes, comments that this "personification" is often little-represented in collections of Maori proverbs, perhaps because it's rare in Maori proverbs anyway, but perhaps.

... other possibilities for the scarcity of personification in traditional Maori proverbs include their omission from published collections because the (mainly European) transcribers or publishers were looking for particular types of proverbs suited for particular markets, and hence rejected those proverbs whose personification may have seemed obscure, or may have required extensive prior knowledge ... Kei takahia a Tahu (Lest Tahu be trampled on - Tahu personified food supplies); Kua tu te haka a Tanerore (The dancing of Tanerore has begun - Tanerore is the quasi-religious personification of the quivering, heated air of summer).

However, Maori is not alone in having obscure proverb and idiom. Going right across the world, we find Alexander Nicolson's 1882 A collection of Gaelic proverbs and familiar phrases, based on Macintosh's collection (Internet Archive collectionofgael00nicouoft). Many of the sayings are perfectly clear. For instance:

Am fear a's mo a gheallas, 's e a 's lugha 'choimh-gheallas / He that promises most will perform least.

Am fear a 's luaithe lamh 's e 's fhearr cuid / Quickest hand gets biggest share.

Am fear a's fhearr a chuireas 's e 's fhearr a bhuaineas. He who sows best reaps best.

Others, however, are very strange.

larr gach ni air Camaronach, ach na iarr im air. /Ask anything of a Cameron but butter.

Bughadh an leinibh Ilich, rughadh an teine. / The bloom of the Islay child, the bloom of the fire.
The 'leanabh Ileach' was a remarkable boy, with a hard stepmother, who fed him badly, and heated his face at the fire, when she wished to pass him off as a well-fed ruddy child. See Cuairtear, 1842, p. 79.

Roinn Mhic Cruislig air na crubain / Mac Cruslick's dividing of the crabs.
He put the contents of the best-looking ones into the worst-looking ones, which he afterwards got for himself.

larraidh Mhic Chruislig air na h-eich. / Mac Cruslick's search for the horses.

M.'s master sent him to search for his horses. 'Where shall I look for them ? ' said M. ' Look for them wherever they are or are not likely to be,' said his master. Presently M. was seen on the roof of the house scraping away with a sickle. On being asked 'what he was about, he replied that he was searching for the horses where they were not likely to be. Campbell's W. H. II. 309.

Cho carach ri Mac Chrùislig / As tricky as Mac Cruslick

From the last anecdote, I think we can assume that Mac Cruslick is an archetypal trickster/fool akin to a Gaelic Till Eulenspiegel, but it's anyone's guess if he was a real person at some point in the development of the phrase.

Both the Maori and Gaelic idioms remind me strongly of one of my favourite Star Trek:TNG episodes, Darmok. This features an encounter with a humanoid race called the Children of Tama, whose captain, Dathon, opens communications with this exposition:

"Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray."

The Tamarian language, the Enterprise crew quickly realise, is made 100% of idiom in unexplained historical and mythological allusions (the meanings are later revealed; for instance, "Shaka, when the walls fell" means failure, and "Sokath, his eyes uncovered!" means an epiphany). Dathon attempts to initiate contact by involving Captain Picard in a ritual of shared battle against an alien monster. Tragically, however, Picard doesn't immediately grasp this intention and thinks it's a challenge to fight Dathon, which he refuses. But finally, when Dathon is mortally wounded by the monster, Picard understands and is able to convey to Dathon a little of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Darmok raised a lot of interest; see Raphael Harper's Darmok Dictionary for a selective annotated transcript. It also led to justified criticism on linguistic grounds; see, particularly Tenser, said the Tensor, which points out the essential difficulty in speaking in archetypical generalisations.

I also don't believe that a language based entirely on allusion is at all suitable for situations requiring precision. If all you're doing is arguing about a general course of action, Tamarese-B might be enough, but how can you run a starship using it? When the captain wants to tell the helmsman to go to warp factor five, does he say, "Darmok...uh...that time he went warp factor five"? At the end of the episode, in fact, the first officer orders his ship to warp out of orbit with "Mirab, with sails unfurled", which is used several times in the episode to mean something like 'go'. Shouldn't the helmsman reply, "Mirab-with-sails-unfurled factor what, sir?".

Quite so. It would be like trying to express "The cat's not eating; take it to the vet" as "Vitus in the arena. 1 Androcles in the forest. 2" without the ability say, "Ask them about FIV vaccination, and pay them the £13.75 we owe them." As the Star Trek site Memory Alpha explains in its Tamarian language article, non-canonical fiction has filled in explanatory detail of non-verbal elements and a musical bolt-on to the language for precise technical discussion.

Nevertheless, you can analyse these things too much. I think Darmok definitely has 'heart' as a story, and is a very nice episode in dramatising, by exaggeration, the difficulty of acquiring idiom when learning a language, and capturing the idiosyncratic flavour of such idiom in some languages.

1. Saint Vitus, whom, according to the tradition, the lions refused to eat when he was thrown to them in the arena.

2. Androcles in Aesop's Fables, who took a thorn from a lion's paw.

- Ray

That bee story again

Oh, lordy. A sizable section of UK television viewership was treated this evening to an exposition by a popular natural history presenter, Bill Oddie, of the urban myth about Einstein calculating that the death of bees would be the death of mankind. See the clip and transcript - Hail Caesar! - from the BBC programme Bill Oddie's Top 10 Aliens.

Brought to the UK by the Romans 2,000 years ago, honey bees make a massive and vital contribution to life on Earth. Not only do they provide honey, but they pollinate much of the flora we admire. Of even more significance, is their role in helping to produce the food we eat. Without bees there would be no fruit, no vegetables and pretty certainly, in an alarmingly short amount of time, there would be no us. Einstein (reportedly *) calculated that if bees become extinct, then in five years so would the human race. A worrying enough prediction in itself, made more alarming recently because the population of bees is plummeting rapidly and that definitely includes here in Britain. At least we know there are problems, we just need to find a way to solve them and hope that Einstein got his sums wrong!

* I bracketed the "reportedly" because for some reason it's in the transcript, but wasn't in the segment as broadcast.

Firstly, spot the massive logical fail. If honeybees were only brought to Britain 2000 years ago, then clearly they're not vital to human survival, since there was a thriving native human population in the British Isles long before the Romans arrived. (The Americas, too, got along fine before the Europeans introduced Apis mellifera). Or is the piece talking about bees in general, not just the honeybee? Hard to tell; but the specifics don't much matter, because there's absolutely no known provable attribution of this story to Einstein.

Until this evening, I thought it first appeared in June 1965 in Abeilles et Fleurs (i.e. Bees and Flowers), the house journal of the French beekeepers' association Union Nationale de l'Apiculture Française, which further propagated the story during a protest in 1994. I find now it has even older roots in French apiculture, as a rather similar claim appears in 1906 in the journal Les Abeilles & Les Fruits (logo pictured above) published by the Socíeté Haut-Marnaise d'Apiculture. An article about an apiculture expo in Nancy features a vigorous defence of beekeepers against fruit growers who didn't want bees kept near their orchards, ending with this warning to those opponents:

Partout ou une plantation s'élève, le rucher est construit: ce sont deux choses inséparables. Ceux qui se font les interprètes de pareilles erreurs sont coupables euxmêmes, et il n'y a qu'à les plaindre si on ne peut les convaincre, mais répétons-leur à cor et à cri le grand enseignement de Darwin:

"La vie de l'homme serait rendue extrêmement difficile si l'abeille venait à disparaître".
- page 1090, July 1906, Les Abeilles & Les Fruits, Volumes 6-8, 1906. 1

Wherever a plantation stands, the apiary is built: they are two inseparable things. Those who are the perpetrators of such errors are culpable themselves, and you can only pity them if you cannot convince them, but we repeat to them loudly the great teaching of Darwin:

"The life of man would be made extremely difficult if the bee disappeared".

That I can find no such statement by Darwin doesn't surprise me, and gives me a strong feeling of déjà vu. The use of his name to give authority to the assertion looks a definite precursor to the fake attribution of the more elaborate scare story to Einstein.

Probably the most enlightening take on the subject I've seen is in ScienceDaily - Pollination Crisis 'A Myth': Honeybees Are On The Rise, But Demand Grows Faster - which reports on a Current Biology paper by Aizen and Harder, who point out "that most agricultural crop production does not depend on pollinators". They argue that globalization has produced a destructive mutual benefit between bee-pollination services and producers of high-value bee-pollinated crops, increasing the market share of those crops and destroying habitats that harbour the many other pollinators. Perhaps the story is mostly about the impact on interested parties rather than humanity in general.

Another solid debunking comes from Keith S. Delaplane, Professor, Dept. Entomology, University of Georgia, who wrote this guest editorial in the newsletter of the British Bee Keepers Association: On Einstein, Bees, and Survival of the Human Race.

For more background, including a summary of discussion with Felix Grant (who has spoken to experts on colony collapse disorder), see my previous post Tracking bee story.

Addendum: see 2012 update Einstein, Darwin and bee apocalypse. 

1. Refinements on the translation welcome.
- Ray

Whistle, and I'll Come To You

This week there was a rare showing of Jonathan Miller's adaptation, the film that started the former Christmas Eve ghost story tradition on British television, of MR James' Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad (part 1 (also above)/ part 2 / part 3). As the BFI Screenline commentary says, MR James purists didn't like some aspects, but it does bring a nice ambiguity by portraying the protagonist as evidentally mentally fragile.

Here's the original story - James has a pleasantly wry turn of phrase

The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

- and Project Gutenberg has the anthology from which it comes, Ghost Stories of Antiquary (part 1 / part 2). The title, incidentally, is borrowed from that of a Robert Burns poem.
- Ray

Full of anachronism? Yes and no.

A nice example, found in the wild, of recency illusion (a term coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky for "the belief that a word, meaning, grammatical construction or phrase is of recent origin when it is in fact of long-established usage"):

Some scenes in the first episode of Emma (4 October, BBC1) ... were well and carefully extended, but in others, exquisite renderings of Jane Austen's own texts were interspersed with anachronistic expressions like "paid up front" and "full of himself". They stuck out like a sore thumb ...
- "Jarring with Jane", Hilary Potts, London W13, Letters, Radio Times magazine, 17-23 October 2009

Anachronisms? Partially true. Google News produces a lovely graph showing the recent origin and growth - post 1970 - of the phrase "paid up front".

The phrase "up front" by itself dates from around 1900 - see Google News - but this is for its general usage (US English for "at the front" ... "in the vanguard").

On the "full of himself". This refers to the section in Emma where Mr Knightley comments on the egotistical Mr Elton.

Austen:
She remembered what Mr. Knightley had once said to her about Mr. Elton, the caution he had given, the conviction he had professed that Mr. Elton would never marry indiscreetly; and blushed to think how much truer a knowledge of his character had been there shewn than any she had reached herself. It was dreadfully mortifying; but Mr. Elton was proving himself, in many respects, the very reverse of what she had meant and believed him; proud, assuming, conceited; very full of his own claims, and little concerned about the feelings of others.

TV version:
Mr Knightley: "That man is is so full of himself I am surprised he can stay on that horse."

While Austen doesn't use the phrase herself, to think "full of himself" a modern anachronism for the time of Jane Austen is definite recency illusion. Emma was published in December 1815. A Google Books search for "full of himself", 1810-1815, gets many hits, showing it to have been perfectly current in the period when Emma was being written. It's actually considerably older; the oldest example I can find is

And the proud man is too full of himself to hear any good counsel.
- A commentarie, or exposition upon the prophecie of Habakkuk: together with many usefull and very seasonable observations, delivered in sundry sermons, Edward Marbury, 1650

It's quite nice because it explains what the phrase means: when someone is so full of themself that it leaves no space for outside input. It has been in currency ever since.

- Ray

Lurid covers 4: legs and other cliches

An Unreal Nature's post Covering anatomy, led me to the online edition of Print

a bimonthly magazine about visual culture and design. Founded in 1940 by William Edwin Rudge, Print is dedicated to showcasing the extraordinary in design on and off the page.

The back issues of Print have a nice selection of articles on books, culture, design and typography. See, for instance, The Law of the Letter (typography's role in shaping nations); Stereotypes (the role of "ethnic typography"); Extraordinary Meeples (design in post-WWII German boardgames); and Cover Girls (the ongoing rebranding of young-adult novels for new generations of readers). Anyhow ... the Unreal Nature link was to One Leg Leads to Another (Steven Heller, Print, June 2008) which documents a cliche of graphic design that Heller calls the "A-frame": covers and posters using the device of framing a scene with someone's spread legs. More discussion on this at She's Got Legs. (So Does He) in the Boston Globe's Brainiac column. Between My Legs, at the generally interesting TV Tropes (Television Tropes & Idioms) notes that it happens in TV format too.

The A-frame is one of many design viruses. See Swoosh! There It Is. In Fact, Swooshlike Logos Are Everywhere for another that many web designers for dotcoms were guilty of a few years back. The Papyrus font is yet another, current, one.
- Ray

Re-colouring the past

A bit of a non-bibliophile and vanity post (I'll get to that bit) but it does spring from something currently in print. This week's Radio Times - 13th-19th December 2008 - has an interesting article by Jon Wilde, "Re-colouring the past", about the recolouring of "Room at the Bottom", a 1969 episode of Dad's Army. The article's not online, but there's an equivalent at The Guardian (Unscrambling an army of colours, Charles Norton, 11 December 2008). The restored episode is to screen on Saturday 13 December, BBC2, 8.25pm.

The RT's explanation of how this was achieved wasn't quite clear, but I was interested to find source, the Wiki of the BBC's Colour Recovery Working Group. The section An examination of source material explains that the episode was originally filmed in colour video format, but archived to monochrome 16mm film by "telerecording" (i.e physically refilming by pointing a movie camera at the colour output on a big TV screen) and only the archive remains. Sometimes, however, telerecording was done without subsequently filtering the colour signal, so the mono film shows the position of the RGB phosphor dots on the colour screen as an overlay of artifacts ("chroma dots") whose pattern contains partial information about the original colour signal. With plausible assumptions, this makes digital colour recovery possible. Techie details here and here.

The actor Ian Lavender stresses in the RT article that this is restoring material to its original coloured condition. He expresses the common view that the more radical process of colourising originally b&w film is "cultural vandalism" (a phase previously used by the Writers Guild of America West on the same subject - see the Museum of Broadcast Communications). Others think it legitimate creation of novel value-added material. In between those extremes, accurate restoration of originally-coloured material seems pretty uncontentious.

This leads to the vanity bit: a few years back I wrote an article which may be of related interest on the whole topic of historical photo and video colourisation: The colour of the past (Scientific Computing World, July/August 2005). It's not just computer-geeky, I promise: there's plenty of historical interest such as Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's remarkable early colour photos (see The Empire that was Russia for a taster); Don P Mitchell's reprocessings of the equally remarkable (and largely forgotten) Venus images from Soviet landers; Mark Simpson on "The Colour of Whiteness" (the cultural effects of the development of colour photography); and a box-out by The Growlery's Felix Grant on the world's oldest known photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's iconic image View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826.
- Ray

Lost in admiration

Further to Lost in a book, I think the last episode of ITV's Lost in Austen ended a brilliantly-conceived drama very satisfactorily. If you missed the series, the official ITV site has background and catchup links. (If you don't mind spoilers, there's a very positive Tim Teeman review at The Times here, and the ITV press centre has episode synopses #1, #2, #3, #4). I hope they don't feel the urge to spoil it by, as is often the case, trying to stretch it out to a sequel. But I'd bet money that a novelisation is in the pipeline. It'd be an interesting exercise because there are two options: the obvious one of writing it from the viewpoint of Amanda Price, the modern character who finds her way into the story; or more subtly, from an in-story viewpoint of any of the characters unaware of the modern intrusion, reconstructing the altered Pride and Prejudice as the story of a social set much-changed by the arrival of a gauche and enigmatic stranger.

Incidentally, I hadn't realised until Googling, just, how many reworkings of Pride and Prejudice there have been. Bridget Jones's Diary is well known to be a very loose retelling, and Bride and Prejudice as a Bollywood take. But further skimming, I find Melissa Nathan's Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field; Paula Marantz Cohen's Jane Austen in Boca; Gill Tavner's Pride and Prejudice (in her Jane Austen Retold series for younger readers); and, well, see Ms H Turner's astonishingly completist Amazon.co.uk Listmania! compilations of Pride and Prejudice Sequels and Remakes, and Patricia Latkin's Looking for Jane in All the Wrong Places. And that's the published ones, not including Jane Austen fan fiction.

P.S. Lily just reminded me of another example: The Jane Austen Book Club, the film based on Karen Joy Fowler's novel of the same name, in which the members of an Austen reading group find their lives are mirroring characters in the books they're reading. I've also just noticed that Darcy and Elizabeth even turn up in the Wold Newton Universe mentioned in the previous post; in the latest revision of the timeline, they're among those irradiated by the Wold Newton meteorite, their descendants' family tree including Tarzan and Doc Savage.

P.P.S. I have, by the way, a soft spot for Jane Austen's work as a prime example of the use of venerable English construct often assumed (wrongly) to be a recent "PC" invention. See Everybody loves their Jane Austen on the antiquity, and ubiquity in the works of generally acclaimed writers, of singular "their" as a genderless construct in English.

- Ray

The Fielding Brothers

There's a rather enjoyable series on Channel 4 at the moment: City of Vice, set in the early days of London's first official police force, the Bow Street Runners. While it's obviously fictionalised, it is accurate in spirit in highlighting the talents of the Fielding brothers.
      The work as a magistrate of Henry Fielding is less known than his career as dramatist, satirist and author (notably of Tom Jones). The career of his half-brother, John Fielding, was equally remarkable; despite being blinded in a naval accident at 19, he went in business and studied law, eventually taking up his brother's post as Chief Magistrate on the latter's death in 1754, and continuing for 26 years as the "Blind Beak of Bow Street" (see also Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 1754–1780). He's the subject of a series of crime novels, starting with Blind Justice, by Bruce Alexander.
      Not to forget a third talented member of the Fielding family: the critic and novelist Sarah Fielding, whose works included The Adventures of David Simple and The Governess, of The Little Female Academy, the first full-length novel written for children.

Addendum: City of Vice portrays John Fielding as constantly wearing a black headband, and this is a slight puzzle. This is how he's depicted in portraits (see the National Portrait Gallery Nathaniel Hone portrait and this engraving). But I rather wonder if he normally wore it covering his eyes, and pushed it up to give the portraits a more personal touch. A contemporary description by Samuel Curwen described him as "having a black fillet over his eyes". But does "over" mean "above" or "covering"? Go figure. - Ray

White Magic

Rather quiet in the shop today - autumn setting in - so I had a chance to finish reading White Magic, the early autobiography of stage magician Jasper Maskelyne. As you can see from the Channel 4 microsite, Magic at War, Maskelyne's name resurfaced in recent years for the interesting accounts of his WWII exploits in the field of camouflage (notably his vanishing the Suez Canal and hiding Alexandria harbour by creating a duplicate).
      White Magic precedes all of this, and covers the broader story of Maskelyne's family, from the Royal Astronomer Nevil Maskelyne via Jasper's grandfather and father (both stage magicians, the former also having been the inventor of a range of coin-operated slot machines and an early variable-spacing typewriter). Most of the book, however, is devoted to Maskelyne's own recollections of his pre-War career.
      It's interesting stuff - but, as is often the case with with showpersons' memoirs, some of it grades well into the fanciful ("Devil Worship in London" - "I attend a Witches' Sabbath" - child sacrifice in France, and so on). This is a bit of a problem with most Maskelyne accounts. Military historian and magician Richard Stokes maintains a website, Jasper Maskelyne, Master of Make-Believe, for a meticulous critique of the Maskelyne story, originally a 21-article series written for the Australian magic magazine Geniis Magic Journal. His research shows that the general view of Maskelyne comes largely from David Fisher's 1983 book The War Magician, which reworked, with additional material, Maskelyne's own ghost-written 1949 memoirs, Magic - Top Secret.
      Stokes documents the many chronological errors and unsubstantiated elements, concluding that Maskelyne's wartime role has been highly embroidered, both by chroniclers and by Maskelyne himself. In Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter, Stokes furthermore presents solid evidence for the identity of the ghost-writer, a Frank S Stuart who specialised in sensational reportage. Nevertheless, it all makes good reading: The Scotsman wrote of White Magic, "This book is almost as fascinating as an actual display of skilful conjuring". Perhaps the telling of a good yarn should be viewed as a performance in itself - as long as it's not taken as reliable history.

- Ray

Neuroscience bolsters Agatha Christie promotion

Via the always excellent Language Log, this: The Agatha Christie Code: Stylometry, serotonin and the oscillation overthruster. Mark Liberman expresses a little caution about the alleged and much-publicised neuroscientific proof that Agatha Christie is a great author: the BBC's Scientists study Christie success, and the like. The repeated quotation of a "Dr Roland Kapferer, the project's leader" smacks of appeal to authority: LL notes that he appears to be a film and TV producer, not (as is implied by context) one of the "scientists from universities in London, Birmingham and Warwick" involved in the work.

Only Grantham Today hints at the back-story: Sisters play famous author in seasonal TV special mentions how The Agatha Christie Code "has been made to mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of Miss Marple and will use scientific analysis of Christie's novels to find out why she was such a successful author" - indicating that the documentary, which screens today, is a belated part of the late-2005 Christie relaunch by Chorion plc.

As I said to LL, the scientific exercise appears to have "promotional" written all over it (given that ITV and Chorion plc have a long-standing co-production agreement for Agatha Christie programmes). Even the premise of the research is to be doubted: sales of Christie's fiction were in decline in the late 1990's, until rebadged by Chorion after its acquisition of the rights in 1999.

Chorion furthermore took the unusual step of a moratorium on professional production of Christie's plays, again to clear the field for revisionist West End productions. Agatha Christie's grandson, Matthew Prichard, in what sounds like an admission of the datedness of her work, commented: "If Agatha Christie is to be as popular as the 21st century as she was in the 20th, we have to be open-minded about interpreting stories in modern ways, much as Shakspeare is reinvented for successive generations".

No, Christie is not staying popular due to some intrinsic quality, but by massive and well-managed reinvention.

Addendum:
I watched The Agatha Christie Code and it confirmed all suspicions: promotion backed up by questionable science. It took the form of a dramatised documentary of Agatha Christie's career, intercut with praise by various pundits (no dissenting voices) and a purported investigation into the reason for her success.

Down to the science. The main experts were computational linguist Dr Pernilla Danielsson (billed as "academic champion of communications") and Dr Markus Dahl, a research fellow (a Johnny Depp lookalike, including top hat) at the University of London Institute of English Studies (he has a good track record of work on textual analysis as a tool in tracing attribution and authorship). The camera tracked around them portentously as they sat at glowing laptops in a dimly-lit smoky room and, bit by bit, revealed the purported secret of Christie's success. As LL guessed, Dr Roland Kapferer wasn't among the experts; he was revealed in the credits as the associate producer/writer for the programme.

The science boiled down to a) computerised textual analysis - word frequencies, and so on - and b) decidedly non-mainstream experts interpreting the psychological meaning of those results. Christie's nearly invariable use of "said", rather than said-bookisms, was claimed to enable readers to concentrate on the plot. Her works' narrow range on a 3D scatter plot (axes and variables unknown) indicated a consistent style, assumed to be a Good Thing compared to Arthur Conan Doyle. Sudden coherent sections in her otherwise messy notebook indicated her getting "into the flow" - a trancelike writing state (Darian Leader, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, endorsed the idea that she had been in a similar, deeper trance during her famous 10-day disappearance) and Dr Dahl argued that this trance transferred to the reader.

The trance theory was the central thrust of the programme. David Shephard, a Master Trainer in Neurolinguistic Programming (chosen, says his CV, for "his mastery of linguistic patterns") asserted that the level of repetition of key concepts over small spaces (e.g "life", "living", "live", "death" in a couple of paragraphs) consolidated concepts in the reader's mind. He claimed further that we can only hold nine concepts in the mind at once (I assume a reference to Miller's classic Seven plus or minus two figure for short-term memory capacity) and that Christie's use of more than nine characters overloads the reader's conscious mind, making them literally go into a trance. Dr Dahl cited a further textual result - Christie's "ingenious device" of controlling the reading speed by decreasing the level of detail toward the ends of books, and stage hypnotist Paul McKenna claimed that this invoked the neurotransmitters of craving and release, making the books addictive.

Finally they rolled out the big gun, Dr Richard Bandler, "father of Neurolinguistic Programming", who repeated the assertion of Christie literally hypnotising readers, and said the lack of detail helped maintain that trance. And that was it: "extensive computer analysis", concluded the Joanna Lumley voiceover, has enabled a "quantum leap" in understanding the source of Christie's enduring popularity.

Why, surely only a cynic could remain unconvinced by such rigorous science...

- Ray