Momo: Hey, can I talk to you? [literally: are you listening to me?]
Ismaël: Yes.
I'm always trying to broaden my reading of bandes dessinées, and this won the Prix René Goscinny 2020 so I thought I would give it a go. The setting is a really interesting alternate history (uchronie as the French put it), in which France won the Algerian war by developing giant nuclear powered robots to stomp out the resistance; but in the end, Algeria gained independence after all after the 1976 Batna disaster (which everyone mutters about but has not yet been described) and the robots were all dismantled apart from one which is quietly rusting away in India. Our protagonist, a hoodlum from Nantes in roughly the present day (2020 ish, in the alternate timeline), is given the task of retrieving it for his crime boss. Meanwhile in the Algerian desert, something very strange is happening.
This is really good, and you don't need to be an expert in the history of France and Algeria to appreciate it. The characters are all well drawn and well depicted, and the scenes of France, Algeria and India are convincing, with the legacy of colonialism a major subtheme. Giant nuclear-powered robots are a silly idea, of course, but the point is that they and their crew became cult figures for kids in the 1970s like our protagonist, who still has his sticker book. Gloriously, the robot he is sent to India to retrieve is named after George Sand, the embodiment of French culture stomping out the natives. Here's the promotional video for the second volume, which is next on my list of non-English-language comics.
It hasn't been translated into English yet (surely some smart publisher will pick it up?) but you can get it here.
Edited to add: Turns out that individual parts are being translatedm, here.
Sun, 14:48: RT @Mij_Europe: Big manoeuvres in French politics before regional elections in June, according to the article below, with a potential spin-…
Mon, 10:49: RT @five_books: “As the Philip K Dick once put it: ‘The sci fi writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities’” —@nwbrux. From s…
3 May 1944: birth of Carl Forgione, who played the meditator Land in Planet of the Spiders (Thord Doctor, 1974) and the Neanderthal butler Nimrod in Ghost Light (Seventh Doctor, 1989).
3 May 1988: death of David Garth, who played Solicitor Grey in The Highlanders (Second Doctor, 1967-68) and a Time Lord messenger in Terror of the Autons (Third Doctor, 1971)
3 May 2004: death of Anthony Ainley, who played the Master from the last scene of The Keeper of Traken (Fourth Doctor, 1981) till the final Old Who story, Survival (Seventh Doctor, 1989)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
3 May 1969: broadcast of third episode of The War Games. The travellers take refuge in a barn in the American Civil War zone, and the Doctor and Zoe vanish in a transport container.
3 May 1975: broadcast of third episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. The Doctor is sent on a suicide mission to destroy Voga.
3 May 2003: webcast of thirteenth and last episode of Death Comes to Time.
3 May 2008: broadcast of The Poison Sky. The Sontarans are defeated, and Martha joins the Doctor and Donna on the Tardis.
3 May 2010: broadcast of Lost Library of Ukko, seventeenth episode of the Australian K9 series. Starkey is whisked away to a far off planet. The desolate world is contained within an alien library card. The Librarian arrives to reclaim the card. One of the best episodes of this series, though it should be added the the library has no in fact been lost.
There was a time when I faithfully tracked each of Big Finish's Doctor Who releases as they came out, and reported them here. I fell out of the habit some time around 2014, and indeed stopped listening to Big Finish all that much until the lockdown really started to hit a year ago. Now there is far too much material to hope that I will ever catch up with it all, so I've been selecting particular characters to follow and made a new commitment to myself to write the stories up here as I get through them.
My most recent run has been the fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, released in 2015. (I previously wrote up the first series here, here and herehere and here.) These are eight stories (well, seven and a half) featuring Louise Jameson as Leela and usually John Leeson as K9, with some good scripts and excellent guest performances.
The first of these is The Exxilons, by Nicholas Briggs, bringing back the race only previously seen in the Third Doctor story Death to the Daleks – and very cleverly not revealing their actual connection to the plot until quite a long way in. It's an inrteresting set-up of a primitive race interacting with more developed visitors (with some echoes therefore of The Face of Evilhere or here.
The Darkness of Glass, by Justin Richards, is set on a fogbound island off the English coast in 1907, clearly evoking the spirit of Horror of Fang Rock and to a lesser extent The Talons of Weng Chiang. For an audio play, the solution to the story is surprisingly visual. The lovely Sinead Keenan and her brother Rory both appear, sadly dropping their native Irish accents. Nicely done nostalgia. Available here or here.
Requiem for the Rocket Men, by John Dorney, brings back the jet-pack wearing space pirates who have appeared in a couple of BF's First Doctor stories (written up here and here, and they also pop up in the second of these stories). To be honest, I wasn't wowed by the concept on their previous outings, but this is a very good tale, bringing in Geoffrey Beevers' Master and Mark Frost as a tremendously villanous King of the Rocket Men, allowing John Leeson to be Evil K9 for a change, and also giving Leela a bit of romance, rather more credibly than she was allowed on TV, with a junior Rocket Man played by Damien Lynch. Available here or here.
Death Match, by Matt Fitton, worked least well of these for me, though that's still not bad as I enjoyed them all. Making Leela a gladiator is one of those rather obvious ideas, and was done, if imperfectly, by Chris Boucher in his novel Match of the Day in 2006. Geoffrey Beevers' Master is here as well, and Susan Brown (recently Septa Mordane in Game of Thrones). But it's fairly obvious from the start what's going to happen, and it duly does. Available here or here.
Suburban Hell, by Alan Barnes, on the other hand is a brilliant evocation of, first, the Doctor and Leela intruding into the 1970s suburban environment where their TV adventures were being enjoyed, and second,and second, the awful horror lurking behind what appears to be suburban normality. Annette Badland and Katy Wix knock it out of the park as the two apparently normal women to whom abnormal things are happening. Great stuff. Available here or here.
The Cloisters of Terror, by Jonathan Morris, brings back Rowena Cooper to a previous Big Finish role as Dame Emily Shaw, mother of Liz Shaw and Dean of St Matilda's College, Oxford. She was great in The Last Post, and she's great in this too. Having myself attended a convent school and then a Cambridge college, you always wonder what historical horrors might be lurking in the cellar. Available here or here.
But it really annoyed me that the characters inconsistently call Rowena Cooper's character both "Dame Emily" and "Dame Shaw". Correct usage is "Dame Emily". "Dame Shaw" is wrong; and you can bet that if she was Dean of the college she'd have made sure everyone knew it. (A friend of mine, who I will call Sam Spade, got a knighthood in the recent New Years Honours. When I congratulated him on getting his gong, he said, "Yes, but my wife was made a Dame a year ago, so I've been Lady Spade for the last twelve months.")
Finally, a double story, The Fate of Krelos / Return to Telos by Nicholas Briggs, brings the Doctor and Leela to a planet where the Vingean singularity is at hand, and then to Telos where they become part of a time paradox in the wings of Tomb of the Cybermen, with Frazer Hines returning as Jamie and also Bernard Holley as crewman Haydon. But the star turn is Michael Cochrane, who was Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid and then Redvers Fenn-Cooper in Ghost Light, and also brilliant as Colonel Spindleton in the two-parter that ended the second series of audio Fourth Doctor Adventures (Trail of the White Worm / The Oseidon Adventure). Here he is both the elderly chap who is uploading his consciousness, and the robot to whom it is being uploaded. It's quite an intricate plot but it is worked out very nicely. Available here/here or here/here.
So basically, I'm several years late but very glad to be catching up with these.
This is the post I had mostly written last night before it was eaten by a glitch in the system. (Always save your drafts, folks.)
The defenestration of Arlene Foster as leader of the DUP and First Minister of Northern Ireland was both overdue and unfair Overdue, because the real crisis of her leadership was only a year into it, with the renewable heating scandal of 2016-17. If she had done then as Peter Robinson did, and stepped back for a few weeks pending an investigation which would probably have given her enough of a figleaf to resume work with dignity, the Assembly would not have collapsed in 2017 and she would not have made the ill-chosen remarks during that election campaign which destroyed any perception that she was willing to look beyond her own electoral silo. Those were both very bad choices that she made, which should have meant the end to her leadership four years ago.
But instead, the DUP pushed her out last week over an important but frankly niche issue: she was not prepared to follow her fellow Assembly members and vote against a resolution condemning gay conversion therapy. Not that she was exactly on the right side of that particular argument, but she was closer to it than her party, who should have abstained with her rather than rise to the bait. (I cannot find Martyn Turner's cartoon of a new exciting children's toy, the Orange Action Man, who is easy to wind up.) Retreating to the citadel is a tactic, not a strategy, and unless you have reinforcements lurking over the hill or across the water, it's a losers' tactic.
The DUP rank and file also blamed her for the hugely unsatisfactory outcome of the Brexit process, but that is not particularly her fault; the entire party supported the destruction of Theresa May's premiership over a proposed deal with the EU that was actually better from the DUP's point of view than the one they actually got with Boris Johnson. The DUP are neither the first nor the last people to be betrayed by Boris Johnson, who has broken faith with everyone he has ever worked with or slept with, and while Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds can be fairly criticised for falling into that trap, it's not fair for the rest of the party, which was equally seduced by Boris, to make that criticism.
Arlene has always been friendly and pleasant to me personally, even though she has not always liked what I say. The last time I saw her, at the May 2019 European election count in Magherafelt, she was chatty and cheerful to me while pointedly ignoring the person I was with, who had annoyed her somehow (I never got the full story). I am not hugely surprised that she intends to leave politics completely now. Her vision is a little larger than her party's, and at present that doesn't fit the direction they want to go, which is to appeal ever more strongly to a diminishing pool of voters.
I am going to break the mould of popular commentary and not dump on Edwin Poots. He has said and done a lot of very stupid, wrong and inflammatory things, and his judgement has often been questionable. But there was one moment when he really did rise to the occasion. Back in January 2018, after a brutal few days starting with an ill-advised tweet by one of Sinn Féin's MPs (who later resigned, the first member of parliament to be brought down by his own social media), he put in a very statesmanlike TV performance which helped to draw a line under it, responding to an even better performance from John O'Dowd (who I hope will follow Poots to the top spot in his own party in due course). This is worth a watch.
Speaking of Sinn Féin, I was invited onto BBC Radio Ulster on Thursday (here, about 55 minutes in) to comment on the extraordinary developments in Derry, where the entire local leadership of the party has been fired by the party centrally. As a former central campaign organiser for a Northern Irish party myself, this seems to me a very drastic move. Even in a party with as centralised a structure as SF, local operations depend on volunteer support and goodwill, and local leaders tend to have a strong local support base among members and sympathisers (that's how they become local leaders). SF must have felt centrally that the incumbent Derry leadership's level of support from local members was so low that destroying their credibility in public, rather than quietly mobilising additional resources in private, was the right way to go.
Not that there was not a very serious problem for the party in the city. Having narrowly won the Westminster seat in 2017, SF's vote in December 2019 sliiped back to the levels of the early 1990s, pre-peace process, and the SDLP got what I think was their best vote share ever in a Westminster election. In the 2019 local elections, SF lost five out of their sixteen seats on the Derry and Strabane district council, three of them in the three electoral areas west of the Foyle which include the historic city centre. While in all the other parliamentary constituencies west of the Bann, SF have comfortably eclipsed the SDLP as the leading Nationalist party, Derry remained competitive, and Martin McGuiness's death removed their strongest local asset.
But what a lot of commentators have missed is that there is quite a large chunk of uncommitted voters in Derry. In Westminster elections they historically tended to vote for John Hume and then Mark Durkan, and in 2017, as a tribute to McGuinness, SF were able to temporarily capture more of that vote than usual. But in Assembly and local elections, these voters have supported independent candidates, and recently to a certain extent Eamonn McCann's People Before Politics, if they voted at all. Given the demographics, most of these voters are were brought up as Catholics, but they do not necessarily vote for Nationalist parties.
This is part of the wider phenomenon that I have been pointing to for a long time. While demographic determinists get all excited about this year's census and the possibility that it will show more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland, the fact is that the biggest growth will certainly be in the section of the population that does not feel comfortable being labelled as either, and whose vote cannot be taken for granted by any party, or by supporters of either the Union or a United Ireland. At his height, Peter Robinson was able to corral a significant part of that support for a mature DUP that offered continuity and stability in partnership government, and successfully rode out his own personal scandals. (Some commentators – indeed some leading DUP members – in the last few days have forgotten that there was a time when the DUP was able to make a credible pitch for centrist votes, but it's really not very long ago.)
I wrote two years ago (scanned here) that these voters are the convinceable middle who historically have conditionally supported the Union, but can foreseeably be persuaded to join a united Ireland, if three things happen:
Brexit turns out badly (✔️)
Unionism continues to be worse than Nationalism at appealing to its own core vote and not engaging with the centre (✔️)
There is a better offer on the table from Nationalists (currently quite far from being achieved, and in particular the need for Nationalists to find a convincing narrative on health services is even more acute after the last year).
Nothing is certain in politics, but the current direction of travel is clear.
Sat, 12:56: RT @DecLawn: The future of the union lies in a cohort of “persuadables” in NI. Most polls suggest they are socially liberal, open-mined, no…
Sat, 14:48: Anton Jäger, Rebel Regions, NLR 128, March–April 2021 https://t.co/tzTrxN7soy Very interesting left-wing comparison of UK and Belgium, or rather Northern England and Wallonia.
2 May 1941: birth of Paul Darrow, who played Captain Hawkins in Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) and Tekker in Timelash (Sixth Doctor, 1985). And Avon, of course.
ii) broadcast, publishing and webcast anniversaries
2 May 1964: broadcast of "The Snows of Terror", fourth episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Ian, Barbara and Susan retrieve the Key despite the efforts of Vasor and the Ice Soldiers. Then Ian finds the last key at their last destination.
2 May 1970: broadcast of seventh episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor and the Brigadier intercept Carrington before he is able to implement his plan, and the alien Ambassadors are freed.
2 May 1973: Target Books re-publish the three 1960s Doctor Who novelisations.
2 May 2003: webcast of first episode of Shada. The Eighth Doctor visits Gallifrey to persuade President Romana to come with him to Cambridge.
Glad to see Belgian numbers finally heading firmly in the right direction, and looking forward to a gradual reopening over the next few weeks.
I wrote quite a long entry including reflections on recent celebrity deaths and Northern Ireland politics, and unfortunately it vanished into the void before I could post it. It’s too late to reconstruct it now, so I’ll just leave this here and try to address some of those topics in future updates.
Sat, 10:45: RT @paperhaus: If you are wondering, should I take a bath while on a Zoom staff meeting? This article provides the answer. https://t.co/EJk…
1 May 1946: birth of Joanna Lumley, who played the Thirteenth Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999).
1 May 1984: birth of Sacha Dhawan, who played Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Space and Time (docudrama, 2013) and the Master in 2020.
1 May 1985: death of George Pravda, who played Denes in The Enemy of the World (Second Doctor, 1967-68), Jaeger in The Mutants (Third Doctor, 1972) and Castellan Spandrell in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976).
1 May 2002: death of John Nathan Turner, producer of Old Who from 1980 to 1989 (and of Dimensions in Time in 1993); controversial and colourful, like him or loathe him, nobody can dispute the depth of his influence on the show.
1 May 2008: death of Bernard Archard, who played Bragen in The Power of the Daleks (Second Doctor, 1966) and Marcus Scarman in The Pyramids of Mars (Fourth Doctor, 1975).
ii) broadcast and production anniversaries
1 May 1965: broadcast of "Dimensions of Time", second episode of the story we now call The Space Museum. Lobos, leader of the Moroks, starts to hunt down the Tardis crew.
1 May 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of Colony in Space. The Doctor and Jo confront first the Guardian of the primitives and then the Adjudicator, who turns out to be the Master.
1 May 1974: Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker film the Third to Fourth Doctor regeneration sequence. Frankly the broadcast version was a bit disappointing; here's one of many fannish improvements.
1 May 2010: broadcast of Flesh and Stone. The clerics start to disappear, but the Doctor manages to tumble the aliens into the mysterious crack, and then has a narrow escape from Amy.
iii) dates specified in-universe
1 May some time in the 1970s: setting of the last scenes of The Dæmons (Third Doctor, 1971).
1 May 1643 and 1984: setting of The Awakening (Fifth Doctor, 1984).
Books finished in the last week: Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi
April Books
Non-fiction 1 (YTD 14) Kathedralen uit de steentijd, by Herman Clerinx
Non-genre 2 (YTD 7) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
SF 12 (YTD 47) Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper Network Effect, by Martha Wells Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo The Gameshouse, by Claire North Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics) Adventures in Lockdown, ed. Steve Cole
Comics 5 (YTD 10) Muse vol 1: Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi Muse vol 2: Coraline, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard Feeders & Eaters & other stories, by Neil Gaiman, art by Mark Buckingham Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings
Current The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells The Evidence, by Christopher Priest
Coming soon (perhaps) Cloud on Silver by John Christopher City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt
“Stories For Men”, by John Kessel Empire Games, by Charles Stross
“Grotto of the Dancing Deer”, by Clifford D Simak Le dernier Atlas, tome 2, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams Kipps, by H.G. Wells
Thu, 22:13: RT @DrWhoCastCrew: RIP Arthur Cox (1934-2021), who played Cully in The Dominators (1968) and Mr Henderson in The Eleventh Hour (2010). He h…
Thu, 22:42: RT @thedalstonyears: For the last month, @Lucy_Osborne and I have been looking into sexual misconduct allegations against the actor Noel Cl…
Fri, 10:45: RT @faisalislam: NEW: Defra Committee cross party MPs release bruising report on “considerable trade friction” & “substantial” new red ta…
Fri, 11:51: RT @SophieintVeld: Deeply saddened to learn of the passing of @hansvanbaalen. For almost three decades we worked together in the European l…
30 April 1983: death of Gabor Baraker, who played Wang-Lo, the rather camp tavern-keeper, in the story we now call Marco Polo and Luigi Ferrigo, a dodgy Genoese merchant, in the story we now call The Crusade
30 April 2004: death of Richard Steele, who played Commandant Gorton in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), Sergeant Hart in Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) and a guard in Mark of the Rani (Sixth Doctor, 1985).
30 April 2020: I missed the sad news a year ago of the death of Wally K. Daly, who wrote The Ultimate Evil for the Sixth Doctor but never saw it produced; he did write the novelisation and eventually authorised Big Finish to produce an audio version. I've heard some of his other radio plays, which are great.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
30 April 1966: broadcast of "A Holiday for the Doctor", first episode of the story we now call The Gunfighters. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 in search of a dentist.
30 April 2005: broadcast of Dalek. The Doctor and Rose encounter a captive Dalek in 2012 America.
30 April 2011: broadcast of Day of the Moon. Against the backdrop of the first moon landing, the Doctor and his companions must solve the mystery of the aliens and the little girl.
30 April 2020: webcast of Sven's Scarf, a prequel to Dalek.
iii) date almost specified in canon
30 April, some time in the 1970s: most of the events of The Dæmons (1971).
Two more months to go of this project. It's been a fun distraction in strange times.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I had three really nice trips in March 2011: to Geneva for one of my regular lecturing gigs at the start of the month, to Belfast for an internal BBC event in the middle, and to London for day-jub purposes at the end. The BBC event in Belfast was held at Stormont, in what had been the main dining room in the old days; despite the crapness of my camera, I got this great picture of the view down the drive while waiting for my turn to speak. (By weird coincidence, I was on the BBC talking about elections again today.)
I managed to read 31 books in the 31 days of March 2011.
~9,400 pages (YTD 20,300)
3/31 (YTD 9/70) by women (Arts, Clarke, Yoshinaga)
2/31 (YTD 5/70) by PoC (Rumi, Yoshinaga)
The two best were volume 2 of the Penguin Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (original vols III and IV), which you can get here, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which I had not previously read in full; you can get it here. Also nice to return to The Little Prince, which you can get here. However I thoroughly bounced off Ian Watson's Miracle Visitorsyou can get it here.
Wed, 13:08: RT @christinebelled: Yes mostly: did not help that Brexit came on top of a lot of other Foster leadership failures: RHI scandal; lack of pr…
Wed, 18:27: RT @AlexofBrown: Confused about what Arlene Foster’s resignation means for Northern Ireland? Let me, a British journalist who watched one c…
29 April 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Faceless Ones. Jamie gets on a Chameleon plane, which is duly captured by the aliens
29 April 1972: broadcast of fourth episode of The Mutants. The Marshal plans to bombard Solos with ionising rockets; Varan and his men prevent him but the Skybase is damaged.
29 April 2006: broadcast of School Reunion. The Tenth Doctor unexpectedly meets Sarah Jane Smith, thirty years on. (Sob!)
29 April 2017: broadcast of Thin Ice. The Doctor accidentally lands himself and Bill in the past, at the final frost fair in 1814. However, something sinister is lurking below the frozen Thames.
I saw this recommended somewhere: two albums written by French author Filippi, best known for his writing for young adults, and illustrated by Dodson, better known for his Marvel and DC work on superheroes.
I'm not sure that I'd repeat the recommendation. Our heroine, Coraline, takes a job as governess to a teenage boy who invents lots of machines in his spare time. At night she has strange dreams which always seem to end with her clothes falling off. The end of the second volume reveals What Is Really Going On, and I have to say that it makes no sense at all in terms of what we have been told of the story. Also notable that the titles of the volumes are the wrong way around – vol 1's title is "Celia", but she is the sister of Coraline, the main character, and not otherwise mentioned until halfway through vol 2. The art is lush and gorgeous, but basically it's two short books about boobs. You can get them here and here.
Wed, 10:37: I see it’s non-paper time again – so soon after the last one? This is obviously a set up to destabilise negotiations. (I remember a similar leak in the Northern Ireland peace process in February 1995, the so-called “Framework Documents”.) The best response is not to respond. https://t.co/jzMlvxG5Dv
28 April 1928: birth of Raymond Cusick, who designed the Daleks.
28 April 1977: death of Anthony Coburn, who wrote An Unearthly Child (1963) and the never-produced story The Masters of Luxor.
i) broadcast anniversaries
28 April 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Doctor and Jo are reunited, and the Thals disagree about how to tackle the Daleks.
28 April 2007: broadcast of Evolution of the Daleks. The Daleks' experiments are destroyed by the Doctor and Dalek Caan escapes.
Thank you all for your kind wishes for my birthday yesterday. One of the great things about the interconnected age is that we can easily reach out and let someone know that we are grateful for their continued existence. It did and does cheer me up, hearing from old and dear friends, and also from people where I was not terribly sure if they liked me or even remembered me
Before I go into how exactly I celebrated, I need to thank my brother William for arranging this very special birthday greeting:
Though somehow he didn’t spot this picture when doing his research:
Anyway. My birthday trip was out to the ancient East of Belgium, to look at the biggest concentration of megalithic monuments in the country around Wéris. I had been once before, but this time I intended to do a comprehensive sweep of all of the menhirs, dolmens and passage graves in the vicinity.
We stayed overnight Sunday in Durbuy, in a lovely five star hotel which had found a way of complying with health regulations; you went down and collected your gourmet dinner on a tray, watching it being made in front of you while you waited, and then took it up to your room to enjoy. Same with a very large breakfast yesterday morning. It is not the same as non-pandemic times, but it was a very pleasant break anyway.
Our first menhir was on the way out on Sunday, at Haillot, a sub-commune of Ohey, southwest of Huy and directly east of Namur. It’s at the end of a short lane in a small village. Anne coquettishly peeked out from behind it. (A friend on Facebook commented: “It’s just over one Anne in height.”)
Yesterday we took the sequence of megaliths in Wéris from south to north, in order. Actually I don’t recommend this. I think you would be better to start at the rather nice museum first thing in the morning, and then go on their self-guided walk around the monuments. Apart from the very last one I describe here, they are all within easy reach of the village centre on foot, and if the weather is good you will have had a great day out. (And then, if there is time, take in the Pierre du Diable at Haillot on the way home if like us you were coming from and returning to the west.)
We knew we were onto a good thing with the very first set of stones, the Menhirs d’Oppagne, 2 km out of Wéris. (50.3174 N, 5.50876 E)
These are nicely set off from the road, framed by a tree. The received wisdom is that they were brought here from elsewhere in the 19th century and re-erected; I’m not sure that I believe that, my instinct would be that there has been a line of stones here for a long time.
The next is one of the two big Wéris sites, 500m from the first set of menhirs, known as the Dolmen d’Oppagne, the Dolmen du Sud or Wéris II.
It has two components – the range of stones, which again have supposedly been assembled from finds elsewhere; and an excavated passage grave, one of three known examples in Belgium – and one of the other two is also in Wéris, while the third was reburied by archaeologists after excavation so there is nothing to see.
Very close by is a solitary roadside menhir, the Menhir Danthine – from behind it you can see the Wéris complex, 350m away.
It’s then just over a kilometre to the other big passage grave, know as Wéris I or the Dolmen du Nord, another passage grave framed by a corridor of stones.
400m to the west as the crow flies, though the walk is more like 600m, is a supposed group of megaliths in a wood. They are not very impressive.
750m to the north is another supposed megalith, even less impressive. The road to it is barred for non-local traffic, so it’s a decent walk.
However, the last two menhirs are much more serious. The Menhir d’Heyd is down a terrible road for driving, about 4 km from Wéris I, and we were too busy concentrating on the potholes to spot it as we passed. Which was unfortunate, as it’s actually rather striking.
And finally, the Menhir d’Ozo, another 2.5 km along the alignment that most of these monuments share, stands proudly in a field (that we did not go into for the sake of the crops).
The alignment is really striking on the map. (The outlier is the unimpressive stone grouping in the wood near Wéris I.)
But that is not all that we saw. Durbuy (the commune of which Wéris is part) is held a sculpture festival in 2019 with odd stoneworks dotted around the countryside, mostly still there. Here’s one by Taiwanese sculptor Dwan Yu:
And another by Belgian sculptor Henry Hardy. (This is number 42, apparently, suggesting that there are at least 40 others that we did not find.)
The keen art hiker could probably spend a day or two wandering in the hills between Durbuy and Wéris finding them all.
And finally (though first in the sequence that we actually saw them) we visited Namur on Sunday to look at the Félicien Rops Museum. (It’s interesting that there are a lot of single-artist museums in Belgium; I cannot think of any in the UK or Ireland, and only one – van Gogh – in the Netherlands.) Rops was a nineteenth century chap with a dubious personal life, but a real eye for detail and character. His erotic ethings and sketchings are particularly memorable. The museum is not expensive (and also not large). My eye was particularly caught by his “The Fourth Glass of Cognac” (1878), and I’ll leave you with that.
27 April 1928: birth of Hubert Rees who played the Chief Engineer in Fury from the Deep (Second Doctor, 1968), Captain Ransom in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), and Stevenson in The Seeds of Doom (Fourth Doctor, 1976).
27 April 1931: birth of Glyn Jones, one of the few people who not only wrote a TV Who story – the story we now call The Space Museum (First Doctor, 1965) – but also appeared on the show as an actor, playing stranded astronaut Krans in The Sontaran Experiment (Fourth Doctor, 1975). See his autobiography.
27 April 1963: birth of Russell T. Davies, head writer and executive producer of the first five years of New Who (2005-10) and author of Virgin New Adventure Damaged Goods (1996). Without him, there would be no New Who.
27 April 1974: birth of Joseph Millson, who played Maria's father Alan Jackson in the first two series of the Sarah Jane Adventures.
27 April 1982: birth of Samuel Anderson, who played Clara's boyfriend Daniel Pink in the eighth series of New Who (2014)
Speaking of whom, 27 April 1986: birth of Jenna Coleman, who played Clara herself in the seventh, eighth and ninth series of New Who, as well as appearances before and after between 2012 and 2017.
27 April 1968: broadcast of first episode of The Wheel in Space. The Tardis lands on a deserted spaceship; the controller of the nearby Wheel prepares to destroy it.
27 April 1974: broadcast of sixth episode of The Monster of Peladon. The Ice Warriors are defeated and the miners are reconciled with the Queen.
27 April 2013: broadcast of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. The Doctor's TARDIS is captured by space salvager brothers and Clara gets lost inside it. The Doctor promises the brothers they can have the TARDIS if they'll help search for her. They agree, only to find that what lies at the centre of the TARDIS can kill them all.
I saw this meme going around a few months ago – what were the covers of the major science fiction magazines for the month you were born? They are a nice collection.
The best is the cover of Analog, by John Schoenherr.
I confess I don't recall any of the stories. The only one that has had much attention since then is "Ambassador to Verdammt" by Colin Kapp; I'm afraid I don't think I've heard of him let alone the story.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had almost as good a cover, by Gray Morrow, and much better content:
The cover refers to "Dawn", the second part of Roger Zelazny's classic novel Lord of Light. Other content includes "Randy's Syndrome" by Brian Aldiss, about an unborn baby who goes on strike by refusing to be born, and "Problems of Creativeness" by Thomas M. Disch, later retitled "The Death of Socrates" as the first part of his novel 334.
The cover of Galaxy Science Fiction by [Douglas] Chafee is not bad either.
The two most-reprinted stories are "Thunderhead" by Keith Laumer, and "You Men of Violence" by Harry Harrison. You can read the whole thing here.
New Worlds and SF Impulse unwisely crowds out what looks like a rather nice image (by Keith Roberts, also author of Pavane and Gráinne) with text about the contents.
This had the first magazine publication of "Daughters of Earth" by Judith Merrill (first published in an anthology in 1952), and three more stories by Thomas M. Disch.
Finally, for completeness, Australia's Future Science Fiction has an cover by Keith Chatto:
As the cover hints, it's back to the past; the magazine contained three stories from the 1950s and one from 1935!
Sun, 12:56: Animate Europe: Animate Europe – Animated Short Films https://t.co/f8Rmt0KVzc The winners of the biennial competition for EU-themed comics, animated.
Sun, 14:48: RT @hilltopkatie: Here’s to Liz @greensideknits . The final posts she wrote for the Tour de Fleece… I re-read them yesterday and they seem…
Sun, 20:48: RT @cristianafarias: I think I’ve found my favorite picture ever taken inside the Supreme Court, and it’s of building support staff setting…
Mon, 09:50: @SawbonesHex Very many thanks for your lovely message! Anne giggling as we watched. But my collection is more complete than you realised!!!! Thanks also to @wwhyte for setting that up! https://t.co/k2sLC4vx0x
Mon, 10:45: There’s no such thing as flawless facial recognition technology. https://t.co/2tyo3pxaJW Even if we can make this technology work nearly perfectly, should we want to? In the case of facial recognition technology, the answer is a definite no.
26 April 1928: birth of Donald Cotton, who wrote The Myth Makers (1965) and The Gunfighters (1966) as well as the novelisations of both stories and of The Romans (1965), three of the best Who novelisations in the range.
26 April 1975: death of Kevin Lindsay, who played Linx in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Cho Je in Planet of the Spiders (1974), and Styre/The Marshal in The Sontaran Experiment (1975).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
26 April 1969: broadcast of second episode of The War Games. The Doctor and friends, including Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, escape in an ambulance but are confronted by Roman soldiers.
26 April 1975: broadcast of second episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. Harry and Sarah are on Voga; the Doctor tries to repair the transmat; and the Cybermen arrive.
26 April 2002: webcast of "Death Comes to Time Part 2", twelfth episode of Death Comes to Time.
26 April 2008: broadcast of The Sontaran Stratagem.
26 April 2010: broadcast of The Cambridge Spy, the sixteenth and in my own view much the worst episode of the Australian K9 series. A freak accident takes Jorjie back to 23 November 1963 (geddit?). K9 and Starkey follow to rescue her and become embroiled in a spy-ring and a race against time to save Darius from never having existed (which would have been such a shame).
I was looking at my grandmother’s memoirs the other day and came across this interesting passage:
Like so many Americans, I know much more about my mother's family than about my father's, and she in turn knew more about her own mother's family. Her mother was Frances Wyatt Belt, whose father was a homeopathic doctor practicing, I think, but I am not sure, in Philadelphia. Her mother was Rebecca Heath Bordley, the daughter of Matthias Bordley. The Bordleys of Wye Island are about the most distinguished of my ancestors; there was a Judge Bordley who sent his sons all the way to Eton before the Revolution – the poor boys went knowing that they could not come home for eight years, and one of them died there, but one my great, great grandfather survived. There is a painting in the style of Zoffany of the two Bordley boys on Archer's Day at Eton, in fancy dress. I have a photograph of it, but the original is owned by my second cousin, Gordon McGrath. For a long time the picture hung in the Hadfield house in Carlton House Terrace, and I was told more than once that it would be left to me, but it was left instead to Gordon's father, Sims McGrath. So it went back to America, and perhaps it is happier there and more valued. And I have the photograph, and also one of "Aunt Gibson" – my grandmother's great-Aunt with whom she spent a great deal of time before her early marriage – my grandmother’s marriage, I mean. I mean I have a photograph of a painting of her by Gilbert Stuart. She and Nellie Custis, the step-daughter of George Washington, were great friends and the story is that the two girls had their portraits painted at the same time for each other.
In these online days, it was the work of seconds to find both of these paintings. Here are the two boys dressed up as archers (I have no idea if "Archers' Day" is a real Etonian tradition).
It was sold for $47,500 at Christie’s in 2018. According to Christie’s, the painting had passed from the artist to “Aunt Gibson” (Elizabeth Bordley Gibson, 1777-1863), then to her great-niece, Elizabeth Bordley Belt McGrath (1842-1926), then to her niece Lady Frances Hadfield (1862-1950), my grandmother’s aunt and unofficial guardian. Not that it maters much, but Christie’s thinks it then passed not to Sims McGrath senior (1877-1959) or to his son Gordon (1920-1990), but to Gordon’s brother Sims McGrath jr (1918-1998), and in 1988 from him to their sister Peggy, who was married to David Rockefeller. She died in 1996; the 2018 Christie’s auction was of paintings from her and her husband's collection. The buyer has not been disclosed. (In parenthesis, I do not completely buy my grandmother's story that the painting should have been left to her; I don't really think she would have known what to do with it. Lady Hadfield was scatty but sharp.)
The painting is by Charles Willson Peale, who got a lot of work from the Bordley family (and is a better known artist these days than Zoffany, who my grandmother accuses him of imitating). Another portrait of the two boys by Peale, at a younger age, is in the Smithsonian but not on display.
I am descended from the younger boy, Matthias Bordley (1757-1828), my 4xgreat-grandfather; the older brother, Thomas, died aged 16 in 1771. It's interesting that in both pictures Thomas is on the right, eyeing his younger brother a bit moodily. In the earlier picture, Matthias is looking straight at the viewer, ignoring the book that his brother is trying to show him; in the later one, he is looking at his brother with a bit of a grin. He went on to marry and have thirteen children.
The portrait of their (much) younger half-sister Elizabeth by Gilbert Stuart, best known for his classic portrayals of George Washington (to be found on everyday objects such as dollar bills), is on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Stuart is best known, as I said, for his older men, but his young women seem to me to have more character on the whole, and that's certainly true of Elizabeth Bordley. She looks like she is about to make a cuttingly sarcastic remark, or at least that is what she is thinking of. The picture is dated to around 1797, the year she turned 20. (She was born to her father's second wife, after his first wife and son Thomas had both died.)
Nellie Custis (1779-1854) was George Washington's step-granddaughter, not step-daughter as my grandmother would have it, and married George Washington's nephew. She and her brother were brought up by the Washingtons after her father's early death. (Their mother remarried, and had sixteen children by her second husband.) The best known portrait of her is indeed also by Gilbert Stuart, but it dates from 1804, a few years after his portrait of Elizabeth. Nellie is 25 and married with at least two children; she's sitting down and thinking, glad of the chance to pause from the domestic fray. The portrait is in the National Gallery of Art, but not on display.
Given the gap of seven years between the two portraits, I don't think my grandmother's story that they were commissioned as tokens of mutual admiration can be true; but Nellie Custis and Elizabeth Bordley were indeed great friends, and Nellie's letters to Elizabeth have been published.
Going back to Elizabeth, there are two other striking portraits of her from later in her life. This by Thomas Sully (on display in the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City, MO, but owned by the Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen PhD Foundation of St Louis) dates from 1820 or 1821, a few years after her marriage in 1817 to Philadelphia doctor James Gibson. They had no children.
She kept herself pretty busy by writing family history (her work is dated 1826, though not published until 1865) and presumably also by corresponding with Nellie and other friends. Here the angles of her face have been softened by middle age, which otherwise does not seem to have hit her too hard. She looks somewhat wistful. A first marriage at forty is relatively late now, and even more so in those days. She had spent many years looking after her mother, who died in 1816. What other options had she not taken, or not been able to take? But she and her husband were to have almost four decades together.
He died in 1856; she lived until 1863, and in 1861 John Henry Brown caught this striking image of her (he was noted for the almost photographic quality of his work, and you can see why, though she doesn't look anywhere near 84 years old). The original is in the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and is surely in colour, but I could not find a picture of it; this monochrome image is from the Smithsonian catalogue of American Portraits.
She still has the same long nose as in the earlier pictures, and I think that she is planning the next cutting remark for anyone who deserves it, just as she was when sitting for Gilbert Stuart 64 years earlier, and perhaps a bit impatient with the hassle of being painted yet again; I can imagine her telling her recently married great-niece Fanny, my grandmother’s grandmother, that she is too far old for all that stuff and nonsense. But I'm glad that they caught her, again, for posterity.
Sat, 12:56: It’s been exactly one year since Trump suggested injecting bleach. We’ve never been the same. https://t.co/CAE7pyq8oA Funny, all of Trump’s crazy and harmful statements blur together for me.
Sat, 20:48: How Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon went from allies to enemies https://t.co/vhsfHyTLvY Good long read. (Hope you can get through the paywall.)
25 April 1923: birth of Paul Whitsun-Jones, who played the Squire in The Smugglers (1966) and the Marshal The Mutants (1972).
25 April 1961: birth of Cyril Nri, who played the Shopkeeper in two Sarah Jane Adventures episodes, Lost in Time (2010) and Sky (2010), and also the Chairman of the Board of Governors in the Class episode The Lost (2016).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
25 April 1964: broadcast of "The Screaming Jungle", third episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. The second Key is hidden in a jungle full of mobile carnivorous plants.
25 April 1970: broadcast of sixth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor finds that the aliens are keeping the original astronauts hostage, but is kidnapped by Carrington on his return.
Unforgiven won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1992, and three others: Best Director (Clint Eastwood), Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman) and Best Film Editing. It lost in five other categories to five different films (including Clint Eastwood’s nomination for Best Actor)
That year’s other Best Picture nominees were The Crying Game and Howard’s End, which I have seen, and A Few Good Men and Scent of a Woman, which I haven’t. I had not seen Unforgiven before, but I had seen a dozen other films made that year: Basic Instinct, Batman Returns, Wayne’s World, Sister Act, The Crying Game, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Player, Howard’s End, Damage, Bob Roberts, Noises Off… and Peter’s Friends. Apart from Batman Returns, which really lost me by trying to make a large number of penguins look menacing, I really like them all, including Unforgiven, though I would not put it at the top of my list. IMDB users rate it second and seventh on the two systems, Reservoir Dogs ahead of it in both cases. Here is a trailer.
We have several actors returning from previous Oscar-winning films, and one who was also in two Hugo winners (one of which also won the Nebula). We’ll start there, with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman as Little Bill, the nasty sheriff, and Ned Logan, the nice black cowboy.
It’s a while since we’ve seen Gene Hackman, but he was Lex Luthor in Superman (1978), the blind man in Young Frankenstein (1975) and one of the lead cops in The French Connection (Oscar 1971). He has aged well.
We saw Morgan Freeman only three years ago as the guy who was Driving Miss Daisy:
It’s a lot longer since we last saw Anthony James, who is brothel-keeper Skinny Dubois here and was the killer in In the Heat of the Night (1967). (Sorry for spoilers, but the film has been out since the year I was born, and it’s my 54th birthday on Monday.)
When first drafting this I missed the first woman of colour to be in two Oscar winners. Morgan Freeman’s character’s wife, Sally Two Trees, is played eloquently and silently by Cherrilene Cardinal, who as Tantoo Cardinal was also Black Shawl in Dances with Wolves.
I see a couple of other returnees in the smaller parts too, though none of the women.
Unforgiven is the third Western to win the Best Picture Oscar, after Cimarron (1930-31) and Dances With Wolves (1990), and the first one that I really enjoyed. Yes, it has its flaws, but this time I found the good points outweighing the bad points. I’m putting it a third of the way down my list, between two other films about crime and law in the USA with historical settings – ahead of The Sting, but below The Godfather.
So, on the negative side: it’s still a pretty violent film. Only nine people are actually killed, but it starts with the horrific mutilation of Anna Thomson’s Delilah and ends with a bloody shootout, with Richard Harris’s English Bob getting beaten out of town and Morgan Freeman’s Ned tortured to death in the meantime. Sure, this drives the narrative, but I don’t have to like it.
And while it’s only one of the three Westerns to have a major role for a black actor, and Morgan Freeman is really really good, one cannot help but feel that it somewhat sanitises the African-American experience of the West – yes, even with his grisly end.
Apart from Sally Two Trees, the other women characters are all sex workers, which is the first time we’ve seen that profession on screen since The Deer Hunter (1978) and the first time they’ve had a positive portrayal since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). There is a debate about whether Unforgiven passes the Bechdel test: the first two steps are easy, but in the one scene where the women are all talking together, they are discussing raising money to get revenge on the men who hurt Delilah, so I think that is a fail. Still, the plot is driven by women who collectively plan and fund a mission, even if the focus of the story is on the men who implement that mission.
As usual with Westerns, the scenery is breath-taking (and my eye cannot detect the difference between Canada and Wyoming); and the music is good too, without being distracting.
I also enjoyed the subplot with English Bob’s top-hatted biographer, W.W. Beauchamp, played by Saul Rubinek, reminding us that most of what we think we know about the West is romanticised fiction.
But what carries the film is of course the performances of Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. (I was actually a little less swept away by Gene Hackman, though Oscar voters were more impressed.) My most recent memory of Clint was his frankly embarrassing performance at the 2012 Republican National Convention, where (in case you have forgotten) he talked to an empty chair pretending that it was President Obama. It’s good to be reminded that he was a really great actor in his day, twenty years earlier. And as I mentioned already, while I have some difficulty with the way Freeman’s character is written, I have none at all with the way he performs. One has the sense of fully rounded personalities, real people in a real environment dealing with real life, as opposed to the cruder dichotomy of Dances with Wolves (and the confused truncation of Cimarron).
So basically I enjoyed this a lot more than I had expected.
The Hugo that year went to “The Inner Light”, from the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The other finalists were Aladdin, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Batman Returns (the only one I have seen) and Alien3. But in this project I am covering cinematic releases only, so we will skip the Hugos this year and go straight on to Schindler’s List. I may take a weekend off.
Fri, 12:56: RT @The66Ramblers: Whenever I think I’ve messed something up at work, I just remind myself at least it’s not immortalised for the rest of t…
Fri, 16:05: These are the last two pictures taken from the surface of Venus, on 5 March 1982, almost 40 years ago. You can also listen to the Venusian wind recorded by Venera 14: https://t.co/GOgKGmMTurhttps://t.co/dLVZ7Bcast
Sat, 09:55: RT @geraldratner: It is 30 years today when I made ‘that’ speech. It seems like yesterday I wish it was tomorrow I would cancel it.
Sat, 10:43: RT @Otto_English: When Dominic Cummings first went to Oxford, he tried to impress his peers by rescuing a squirrel that was trapped in a bi…
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506135_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506384_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506531_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
![d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2506843_600.jpg?w=584&ssl=1 "d02-2z-c0440[1].jpg")
Overdue, because the real crisis of her leadership was only a year into it, with the 
