image: WikipediaLovejoy. Has it really come to this? Lovejoy. Have I sunk so low as to include a crime drama where the protagonist is not a policeman? And after such a lame clue as that (I know, I know, some of you thought “ranking” was a clue for Ian Rankin, the writer of Rebus, but the Rebus TV series was such a clunker…)
Where was I? Ah yes, Lovejoy… Ian McShane you probably remember from Deadwood. Diane Parish from Eastenders. But Dudley Sutton will always be Tinker Dill.
What makes Lovejoy into a contender, of course, is pretty much the content of the programme – like Columbo, there is little to no onscreen violence, and the vast majority of Lovejoy’s solutions come from his own personal province – antiques – and that’s as it should be, being as how he’s an antique dealer.
Crossword addicts will have noticed that I embedded “MORSE” into the last paragraph of the previous post. That’s appropriate for today’s candidate, as the series itself played the same trick, embedding clues and red herrings into the soundtrack, appropriately in Morse code. Indeed, Morse’s name was embedded in the opening theme (although some CW pedants complained that the timing made it sound a bit like t-t-o-r-s-e…)
But I’m jumping ahead of myself. The crossword addict, opera-loving, beer-swilling Inspector Morse, as played by John Thaw, was
Not so long ago, a beleaguered and, no doubt, overworked copper was sorting through evidence (who knows why – maybe Walt and Jesse had been up to their old tricks) and came across a bunch of cash marked with the tag PC World. Naturally, they immediately put out a call to see if Police Constable World could get in touch… the genius response was that he might be found through his supervisor, Dixons of Dock Green.
All of which isn’t amusing if you don’t know that there used to be electrical shops called Dixons, and before they stopped using the name, they shared space with PC World shops. And that Dixon of Dock Green ran for 21 years on the BBC – from 1955 to 1976.
Right, let’s start with a trivia question: what was the first British film to be legally shown in communist China? If, having read the title of this post, you said “The Sweeney”, you would be wrong. Mainly because, for some weird reason, they decided to title the spin-off movie “Sweeney!”. I know, weird, right? Still, if that wins you the next pub quiz it’ll all be worth it I’m sure.
But that’s what you did in the 70s with TV shows. Dire adaptations of Steptoe and Son (a jolly TV show turned into 90 minutes of heart-rending misery… twice), Dad’s Army drawn out at such length you could visibly see the paint drying on the sets, Sweeney! did much the same, stitching two episodes together and ramping up the violence and nudity.
“Little Voice” was on last night (if you’re in the UK, you can watch it on iPlayer for about a week). I mention this simply because the wonderful Annette Badland is in it. She’s never really been a star, never a household name, but she is one of those supporting cast players of whom I think “she’s never in a bad movie”. As Mrs Fezziwig, she’s one of the best things about the Patrick Stewart version of “A Christmas Carol” (I know it’s Hallmark, but it’s still my favourite version.)
I mention her specifically because she played Charlotte, a recurring character in the BBC’s detective series “Bergerac“.
An interesting question on Twitter the other day got me thinking. Would I agree that Jack Frost is the British Columbo? Well, maybe, but then again, there are a few dissimilarities too.
But what is it that makes Columbo so good in the first place?
Some time in 1993, I decided to start taking this “work” and “career” thing a little bit more seriously than I had been doing. I’d basically been trying for a few years to become a games programmer on the Commodore 64, and when that didn’t pan out – mainly due to interest in the platform drying up – I was left with a set of obsolete skills and no real CV to speak of.
Enter “temping”. Basic data entry, more money than I’d earned so far (although it’s not as much as I earn these days, thanks to inflation it still felt like a serious chunk of dough back then).
I bought it just after I moved away from York most recently. Its 1970s styling attracted me – every time I looked at it, I felt like Robert Culp in an episode of Columbo, artfully timing things with millisecond precision on one half of a split screen while a jazz soundtrack played in the background. But I digress. It wasn’t an expensive watch, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was something I enjoyed having and wearing. Even when people questioned why I was wearing a watch – my standard answer being that it provides some protection from the random crims who ask the time to see what phone you’ve got in case they want to steal it – it never bothered me. It was always something I did because I liked it. No other reason.
I thought the battery had run out, so took it to a shop to replace it. Alas, it turned out there was nothing wrong with the battery – the mechanism itself had gone. I can replace it – but the price is nearly twice what I paid for the watch in the first place.
Then at work, my iPod random played this song:
I first heard this on the record “A Place In My Heart”. Never having heard any Nana Mouskouri, I saw this in a charity shop and seemed to remember she had been immensely popular and bought it for 50p. Of the songs, none of them were particularly interesting, except this one: “Attic Toys”.
My understanding of the song (and I can’t really make out the words that well – there’s a limit to what a 40 year old vinyl bought from a charity shop can reproduce when digitised and shoved into iTunes) is that it’s a moment in time when a woman goes into her attic, and finds the boxes of toys from her childhood.
All those smiling dolls, they had names once. Personalities. She invited them for tea parties, dressed them, cared for them. Nowadays they sit in rotting cardboard boxes, kept company only by the bugs and the spiders up here in the dust. Do they still have names? Who can remember?
Vanished hopes and disillusions
Peel away the memories like a knife
Like “Whiskey On A Sunday“, this song’s almost unbearable to me. It’ll make me cry nearly every time (I’m crying now and I’m only thinking about it).
I have a “watches graveyard”. Timepieces once worn and loved, batteries ran out, replaced by something “nicer” or “funkier” or “more up to date”.
OK… recently I’ve become interested in music on vinyl again. I won’t bore you with the details of this fascination, but I’ve been digging through my collection, digitising them, and adding details to Discogs as I go. (Plus, of course, frequenting second hand record shops, and rooting through the vinyl bins in charity shops in search of ancient gems… but I digress)
Finally, I hit new ground. Take a look at this label:
It’s 3am right now. I’ve been drifting off to sleep with Spotify mobile, only to wake up with a start with a weird thought.
There’s a well-known idea called “the technological singularity“, which is the point where machine intelligence outstrips human intelligence – where perhaps the machines become self aware, too. Its treatment in popular fiction has basically been either Short Circuit or Terminator, but they both have that core self-awareness as the theme (after all, a super-intelligent computer that doesn’t know it’s the smartest guy in the room doesn’t make for a great movie).
What prompted me to start thinking about this is the fact that earlier tonight I played through the developer commentary for Left 4 Dead, and they were talking about music being at the “pre-conscious” level. Some part of my brain stored this, and with consciousness drifting (well, pretty much drifted, actually) suddenly two and two hit together and made four. But to explain my thinking, I’m going to need to get a bit techy first.
