Vampire Slaying, fifteen years too late.

I've never seen a vampire in real life.  Apart from some questionable characters seen during various festivals at Whitby, my life has been vampire-free, and all the worse for it, it seems.  I've recently been getting into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you see.  The endless joys of Netflix have enabled me to scoot merrily through seasons 1-6, and it is being made increasingly clear by Joss Whedon's critically acclaimed show that vampires make your life a whole lot more exciting.

Anya's Hallowe'en suit - like Bishop
Len Brennan, she is terrified of rabbits.

I should have watched Buffy at the proper time, of course.  It first aired in 1998, when I was fourteen, sitting comfortably in its demographic; however, I somehow managed to miss out on its charms.  Being an American show at a time when  The Simpsons and Friends were still pretty esoteric and niche on this cold, huddled little island made it almost imperceptible to me.  I am vaguely aware that it was on BBC throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s, but I was busy with the grimy business of being a teenager and later a student.  I simply missed it.  But now, eager to make for lost time, I'm imbibing the contents of this macabre, funny and tightly plotted programme like a crazed man drinking Drambuie before Christmas is up.

It's tricky to define what makes Buffy such a good show.  I should confess that part of my joy is probably taken from my naive assumption that a show with a name as seemingly foolish as 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' must be awful.  How nice it is to have one's prejudices slashed like this - if only the same thing could happen to my view of Tories.  So, part of my enjoyment may stem from this astonishment.  However, the bulk of it is down to the character arcs.  In fact, they are more viaducts than arcs, given their complexity.  Buffy, for example, undertakes challenges and difficulties that shape, distort and bend her into one of the most complex characters I've seen in a TV show.  She dies at least twice (by Season 6 - I won't tell you how or why) and has family members come and go like Pop-Up Pirate.  She has a turbulent love life revolving around the undead themselves, and hates herself for it.  Her best friends are regularly put in mortal danger by her very existence.  She holds the fate of every living creature on Earth in her poor hands.  Watching her life billow and crease and occasionally fall apart is great fun.  The supporting cast have just as convoluted and myriad plotlines that weave and twirl around each other, creating a colourful, emotional and hilarious tapestry of death and despair.  The oxymorons mount up due to the very dichotomy at the heart of the show - it's a true horror-comedy.

So, a complex, involving show that makes you scream, cry and chortle in equal measures?  Yes; that's precisely what Buffy is.  A sample episode - the Emmy-winning 'Hush' from Season 4 - had me squirting hot tears of terror at regular intervals, thanks to the menacing yet oddly camp withered-headed villains that steal the voices of a population, leaving an episode almost devoid of dialogue (usually the show's strongest suit).  The characters resort to crude charades-style miming to convey the plot to each other, and to us.  Yet this is, of course, where the humour comes in - confusion, bewilderment and misunderstood gestures are always a grand source of amusement, after all.  So I dilly-dallied between fear and amusement like a man on a waltzers filled with twirling axes.

As for the archetypal Englishman, Rupert Giles... I cannot stress enough what a fine portrayal of a disconnected yet caring father figure this is.  Anthony Head gives a performance that even trumps his Nescafe adverts of the late 1980s (no mean feat, and you know it), and his departure is a harrowing moment that suggests that a vital safety net has been removed from underneath the Slayer, making her even more vulnerable.  I'm told he returns before the end, and I seriously hope he does, as watching the younger characters flounder and struggle to find answers without his wisdom and security is probably as stressful as actually trying to sort it all out yourself.

So, fifteen years late, I am discovering a show that has shocked me with its quality - a show that I am actually extremely sad to have missed the first time round.  I can only imagine how it would have impacted my impressionable little brain back then.  It even has an episode that is entirely in the form of a traditional musical...

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Bristol Old Vic

The haunting, insistent tapping music created on a load of old planks, carried by a young and inventive cast, proved a high point in this inconsistent yet memorable production at the Old Vic.  The planks of wood are the central props in the show, playing a myriad of roles from Oberon's fairy hordes to the jaws of a hunting dog, all controlled by the wonderful choreography of the Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse) and the clever movements of the cast.

Having large hunks of wood in a central role is a brave move in any performance, with the possibility of cliched puns groaning from all quarters.  However, it pays off admirably, and I would argue that the work done with the 2 by 4 is probably superior to that done with the more conventional puppets.  Their use as instruments, elements of large scale dioramas, creeping tides and waves and forest pathways shows a real creative spark, and lent the whole show a sense of delight that it may otherwise have lacked.  The traditional puppets, all creaking joints and mischievous faces, were often lacklustre and even redundent.  The acting started reasonably and got an awful lot stronger, leaving the odd homunculi-like doppelganger puppets seeming unnecessary and forced, dragging the attention of the actors (and audience) away from the complex language and plot structure of Shakespeare.  Oberon and Titania were stronger - the sparse puppetry used well to create ethereal and otherworldly characters that are very difficult to successfully portray in the usual manner.  But it was the planks that stole the show.

The Mechanicals were wonderfully played, with the play-within-a-play of Pyramus and Thisbe a manic and super-detailed romp: the wall getting, perhaps, the biggest laughs, which is an impressive achievement.  The vigour and timing of the Mechanicals was great, bestowing the script with the skill required to make it truly hilarious.  The teenagers in the audience laughed even more than the adults.  The love square of Helena et al was reasonably portrayed, but bogged down in the wholly gratuitous puppetry.  Attempts were seemingly made at presenting the puppets as external souls, or perhaps the second part of a dual personality - at one point, Hermia and Lysander swap puppets - but it never quite seems to work.  Puck was, for me, the true highlight.  Portayed using ony a mallet, hammer, basket, saw, chisel and blowtorch, the inventiveness behind one of Shakespeare's most inventive beings is a joy to watch.

And so, before I stop - Bottom.  It needs to be mentioned, but I will not give the game away.  If nothing else, you have to see this production for the porytrayal of the Ass-form Bottom.  The actor playing the role imbues him with an excellent cod-Grecian accent and attitude, but after his transformation, you'll never look at a bicycle the same way again...

Science on the Telly

Hurrah for Sir David Attenborough.  In a benighted world, he still calmly presents the facts of life in his wonderfully honest and sincere voice (easily the nicest voice in the world, after perhaps Ian McKellen’s Gandalf).  This is good, as the rest of the telly-world seems bent on providing mis-information, dogma and foolishness.  ‘Science’ is the abstract noun that gets the most punishment.  For whatever reason, the realm of science is treated as just that by the media – a fairytale kingdom, unknowable to the masses, and only really comprehended by a lucky few who possess the magical properties required, like jumping into an enchanted lake or breaking the back off a wardrobe.  ‘Science’ is a mystery, a bizarre concoction that seems to consist of huge, blinking machines, intimidating men and women wearing goggles and looking stern, huge explosions and Brian Cox.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in a recent episode of The Year of Making Love – a deeply misguided TV ‘experiment’ that attempts to prove that ‘science’ can match people up and make them fall in love.  Now, at first glance I thought this meant they would take people’s initials, plonk them on the periodic table and set them up that way (‘So, Annette Goon – you’re paired up with Alec Umbrella, and what a beautiful sight they are together!’).  But no.  The ‘science’ that is so mystically invoked by the utterly unlikeable Cherry Healy is, in fact, a few questionnaires, compiled by a couple of boffins who calculate what people’s hobbies are, and match them up that way.  If this is science, then so is putting forks in the correct section of your cutlery drawer.  There was nothing remotely scientific about the approach taken in the programme.  There was no concern at all about the incredible number of variables at work in this experiment, or the terribly subjective nature of the ‘scientists’, who shrieked happily whenever a couple were first introduced: “Ooh look, they’re smiling! They’re going to get on just fine; oh, these don’t look happy – look, he’s not impressed by her webbed fingers at all – this won’t end well”.  Hardly an unbiased observation.  The impact of having a camera crew slavishly follow these poor singletons on their dreadful dates  wasn’t considered at all.  I always thought science was about minimising the intrusion of the observer; having a camera lens right in your face when trying to enjoy crème brulee in a gastropub with someone you’ve just met doesn’t really suggest CERN levels of scientific rigour when testing their likelihood of getting all sexy.

But I could put up with all of this foolishness if the programme didn’t keep insisting it was all deeply ‘scientific’.  It got so deluded that it put me in mind of a crazed drunkard sobbing that he is really sober, whilst miserably urinating all over his duvet and staring, teary- and bleary-eyed at a photo of his dead dog.  ‘Remember’, Healy says, ‘that science has put these two together’.  Even the pudding-faced contestants kept insisting that their romantic successes and failures were all down to ‘science’, as if this was simply the name of the lead researcher.  Perhaps it is.

Hearing it so often ends up having a powerful effect.  There will be people who believe that it has now been proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that science can hook people up. To most, this will suggest that potions, or weird blinking machines can act as cupid.  They will take this misapprehension to the grave.  Yes indeed, it’s fine when it’s about something as ephemeral and pointless as this TV programme, but when the same thing occurs with science that matters, such as inoculation or nutrition  (read anything by Ben Goldacre to find out just what kind of egregious misinformation is out there) then we surely have to blow the whistle and demand that science is taken more seriously.  Surely?

People could argue that Brian Cox is the perfect saviour of this grim situation, but I would have to disagree.  His new series, Wonders of Life, is an exploration of biology by a physicist - odd and not altogether helpful, but then what do I know?  Maybe cross-discipline stuff is all the rage now.  Maybe I should start designing skyscrapers or performing brain surgery for a giggle.   But my real problem with this show is the man himself.  He's being hailed as the natural successor to both Attenborough and Patrick Moore.  How dare these faceless folk suggest such a thing?  If Brian Cox ends up 'replacing' Attenborough once he's gone (after what I hope would be the most wonderfully extravagant and beautiful state funeral humanity has ever seen) then I will set fire to my television and sit in a corner, grumpy, for the rest of my life.  He's just too there.  Here's a zebra, look at it's pretty stripes and happy face.  But wait, Brian Cox is standing right in front of it, gurning and bubbling like a moron about how awesome it all is.  Too much effervescence, too little information and far too much of Brian Cox's face.  Attenborough only rarely pops up to speak to us face-to-face, and that's the right way to be.  Cox just can't get enough of his own teeth on TV, and that's to our detriment.

We need proper, informative, classy science shows on the TV; all else is just fluff.