Sherlock, Christie, Dickens, Star Wars and stuff

Happy New Year to y’all! From my greeting you will have gathered that our recent holiday in New Orleans has rubbed off on me a bit - great place to visit but not just before Christmas if you’re trying to lose weight! Tom Cruise was in town while we were there filming the second Jack Reacher movie - had I but known I would have offered up Junior as a possible stunt double (yes, that’s right, you thought it was really Tiny Tom climbing all those buildings and jumping off planes in the Mission Impossible movies, but it is really all clever trickery and toddlers!) 

I have decided to do a new post because for the first time in several years I have actually found myself vaguely interested in some of the TV that was on over Christmas. There is a common theme between the main productions I will be reviewing here (Sherlock, And Then There Were None, and indeed my cinema jaunt to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I will throw in for good measure), as it feels as if I had been waiting for all of them for a very long time indeed (the exception being Dickensian, which just sort of turned up but now seems to be lingering). Warning - THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! LOTS OF SPOILERS! 

Sherlock 

Let’s get Sherlock out of the way first, shall we? From the reviews I have seen it looks like more than half of viewers thought it was utterly fantastic, but a significant minority found themselves rather mystified and muddled. I fall somewhere in between, in that I did at least understand what was going on (it’s basically Sherlock does Inception via Suffragette) but found myself frustrated that it was not what I was hoping for or expecting. 

From the trailers it appeared that what Messrs Gatiss and Moffatt were going to offer us was a genuine “stand alone”, Victorian-set Sherlockian chiller. I was VERY much in favour of that idea. Ever since Cumberbatch and Freeman took on the mantles of Holmes and Watson, my one tinge of regret was that I always assumed that it effectively precluded them from ever playing the roles in a Victorian setting, which I always thought that they would do very well. 

When I heard that in the next episode of Sherlock they were proposing to do just that, I therefore got rather excited. For a Christmas episode, no less! One of my favourite Sherlockian dramatisations of all time is the hammily delicious Jeremy Brett version of the Blue Carbuncle. But this was going to be different - it had a supernatural element to it! So much the better - Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. I wanted to be scared. I wanted them to create a mysterious, gaslit, frightening atmosphere. I was expecting goosepimples! What we got instead was Sherlock hallucinating about dressing up in a silly costume for an hour and a half whilst pepper-spraying the viewers with twenty “in-jokes” a minute, then waking up, getting off a plane and into a car! That was it. 

Unfortunately it is next to impossible for a production to be both atmospheric and “knowing”, and this was a “nudge nudge wink wink” production down to its fingertips. By the end my ribs were bruised from all the nudging and Gatiss and Moffatt have been winking at their audience for so long now that unfortunately it appears to have developed into a nervous tic that they can’t quite shake off. The first two seasons of Sherlock were great because they kept all the “stuff going on in Sherlock’s mind” to a minimum - every once in a while we would have him going to the scene of the crime in his mind and moving stuff around, and that was fine because the filmmakers were using the technique sparingly. But then they started overdoing it in season 3 and they really went into overdrive here to the extent that at times it’s getting close to unwatchable.

So there we were, jumping back and forth between present day Sherlock, Victorian era Sherlock, and a few weird scenes that combined the two (featuring everyone’s favourite twinkly Irish supervillain Moriarty, who isn’t going to let a little thing like being dead stop him from yammering on about how clever he is), and by the end I was getting more than a little fed up with it and got close to yelling “Just pick an era and sodding well STICK to it!” at my TV screen.

Of course it all turned out to be drug induced. What a surprise! Perhaps it is just me being puritanical, but what really frustrates me is the way that virtually every Sherlock Holmes film or TV film since the Brett era seems to have latched on like overexcited limpets to Sherlock’s drug habit, as if that was the most interesting thing about him (especially the 2002 Hound of the Baskervilles and that weird one with Rupert Everett - ironically the Robert Downey Jr version wasn’t too bad on this front!) It is IN NO WAY the most interesting thing about him! It is something that Conan Doyle made a passing reference to in two or three of the sixty original stories but it was never something that he spent pages and pages banging on about, for the obvious reason that he was busy telling gripping stories. Until now Gatiss and Moffatt had resisted the temptation to “make it all about the drugs” but unfortunately they couldn’t resist it this time. 

A plot did manage to winkle its way in there somewhere, and it was all about a gang of feminists teaming up to “right society’s wrongs” by, er, killing that guy who played Percy in Blackadder. Whilst supportive of the concept, I make no claim to be an expert on feminism, but it was hard to miss that this was a bizarrely misogynistic way of coming out in support of the feminist movement! This point was not lost on Buzzfeed either (there was much talk of “mansplaining”), but luckily most of the great unwashed viewing masses were probably too confused by this stage of the show to get offended. 

Similarly, I did feel that Amanda Abbington as Mary is getting slightly short shrift - I get that Gatiss and Moffatt are working their little cotton socks off to try to remedy the lack of strong female characters in the books and I applaud them for doing so (the character of Mary in the original novel “The Sign of Four” is particularly insipid and spends most of the time crying on people’s shoulders - clearly the writer of the play Crucifer of Blood, later turned into a turgid film with Charlton Heston, thought the same, although he went for the simpler approach of just turning her into a serial killer). The trouble with the Gatiss/Moffatt version of Mary is that when every line she is given seems to be a variant of “I am stronger/cleverer than you”, rather than having the scriptwriters actually working to create a fully rounded three dimensional character that the audience can make its own mind up about (“show, don’t tell - more on this later in the context of Star Wars), it starts to get rather tiresome. Having said that, the show does boast some genuinely strong female characters, Molly Hooper foremost amongst them, and there are many shows still being made that don’t even manage that, so let’s not beat them up too much!

All these negatives aside, the film did pass Mark Kermode’s famous “six laughs” test comfortably (I was chuckling throughout) and there were some great moments. Particular highlights for me were Mrs Hudson lamenting her lack of lines in Watson’s stories and consequently refusing to speak to anyone (Una Stubbs may just be the best thing in the show); Martin Freeman managing to turn in a fine authentic performance as “Victorian Watson” in spite of all the gimmicks (is it me, or is he starting to age into Ian Holm for real now?); moustachioed Molly; and of course fat Mycroft (just a wafer thin plum pudding or two away from Mr Creosote). I will undoubtedly watch it again (along with all the others) and will probably enjoy it more the second time round as I won’t be expecting something M R James could have written.

Dickensian

Luckily we were not left at a loss for something more typically festive, and I’m not talking about Phil Mitchell’s annual tradition of smashing up the Vic with a baseball bat with an ironically jaunty Christmas tune playing in the background (“leave it aaaht”). Succour came in the form of Dickensian, a multi part mystery set seven years before A Christmas Carol and dealing with the murder of Jacob Marley, featuring what can only be described as an eccentric smorgasbord of suspects from various Dickens novels, from Scrooge (Ned Dennehy apparently doing an impression of Prince Philip doing an impression of Alistair Sim), to Fagin (Anton Lesser proving that Ron Moody may be no longer with us but his twinkly pickpocketing spirit lives on). Heck, even “Little Nell” is a suspect. 

This one’s rumbling on for a few weeks so I still don’t know whodunnit (my money’s on Tiny Tim), nor, in truth, do I particularly care, but it is an undemanding and vaguely diverting way of passing the time even though (or perhaps because) it involves a lot of familiar looking thesps doing their best “Christmas pudding” acting (often overcooked, extremely fruity and not quite as delightful as it thinks it is). I suspect that they have been urged to overact as much as possible in order to distract from the ludicrously fake backdrops. 

And Then There Were None

This, a 3 part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s darkest novel, is a mystery of an altogether more sombre nature. I became a fan of this novel at the age of 14 when I spotted a very dog eared copy of an old edition being sold off by my secondary school library for 50p. When I say “old edition” it really must have been, as it still bore the original, highly racist title it was published under in 1939, or “before racism was bad” as David Brent would put it (which perhaps explains why Sevenoaks School, with its almost militantly “internationalist” approach, was so desperate to get it out of its library as quickly as possible!) 

It was later republished as Ten Little Indians (as each of the murders that is committed in the novel is based on a line of the nursery rhyme) but “Indians”, although an improvement on the word it replaced, was also judged to be inappropriate for a 21st century adaptation,, so we have the slight but probably unavoidable incongruity of ten people from the 1930s, some of whom, it is clear from the script, are horribly anti-semitic, homophobic or just generally intolerant, nonetheless being sufficiently enlightened to refer to the “Ten Little Soldier Boys” nursery rhyme. 

In truth, Christie should have known better even in 1939 than to scatter the pages of her novel so liberally (or “illiberally”) with so much casual racism, but what is equally true is that in spite of this uncomfortable and grubby drawback, the book is a classic and has undoubtedly inspired hundreds if not thousands of imitators (including the Alien franchise). A detective story with no detective, it soon becomes clear that no-one is safe from the mysterious “Mr U N Owen” (think about it - it’s a tricky one) who has lured ten strangers, each of whom may or may not have committed a murder or two themselves in the past, to a remote, inaccessible island, to punish them for their crimes by one by killing them off in increasingly elaborate ways, only for it to turn out that he (or she) is in fact one of them. But which?

This is actually the sixth film adaptation of the novel, with the classic version remaining Rene Clair’s 1945 adaptation featuring a veteran cast of scene stealers including Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, C Aubrey Smith and Judith Anderson, all of whom find themselves upstaged (and outlived) by the resident cat (who wasn’t in the book and rather disappointingly does not turn out to be the murderer). 

I have also seen the 1960s version (with the action moved from the island in the novel to a remote Swiss chalet - it isn’t bad, but the Shining it ain’t) and the 1970s version (set in the desert - this was the one where the murderer inexplicably makes an early mistake of allowing Charles Aznavour to get through a whole song BEFORE poisoning him). I haven’t seen the Russian version or the 1989 version, which is reportedly rather terrible and starred Sylvester Stallone's brother Frank (remember him? Me neither!) As far as I am aware though, up to this point all of the adaptations have shunned the “dark” original ending (spoiler: absolutely everyone dies) in favour of the alternative ending which Christie herself used in her own stage adaptation of the novel, where MOST people still die but two of the guests turn out to (a) be innocent and (b) survive. So it was clear to me that there was room for at least one more version, this time faithful to the original ending. Clearly the BBC had the same idea. Don’t go looking for happy endings.

Does it work? More or less - the problem is that all of the characters are now so unsympathetic that at times I found myself actually rooting for the killer. This was also true up to a point in some of the previous adaptations, but at least in those versions the characters were fun to be around (and not only the two innocent ones, the other victims/suspects were also generally portrayed with eccentric charm that I couldn’t help liking them in spite of their “crimes”, at least in the 1945 and 1965 versions). Here, the original ending is retained but several of the characters’ backstories are changed to make their crimes even more heinous than they were in the book, which I think was an unnecessary step as it only served to repel the audience more. 

There are exceptions, such as Sam Neill as the general (Sam Neill can never be truly dislikeable), Toby Stephens as the doctor (who is keeps getting so amusingly hysterical that one can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him), and Charles Dance as the judge. I always used to think that Charles Dance was essentially Ian Richardson without the twinkle in his eye, but I wonder whether Richardson bequeathed Dance his “twinkle” in his will, as recently the latter appears to have developed an oddly sympathetic streak, which strangely seems to come to the fore mostly when portraying characters who in the novels are singularly “untwinkly” (this was the case here and also in Game of Thrones).

The other acting is also fine, although Anna Maxwell Martin is not given enough to do (it feels as though she is only given a few brief moments to develop her character, which she does excellently, before being ignominiously bumped off). Noah Taylor as the butler is shifty and sinister, Burn Gorman as the bent copper seems to be channeling Billy Mitchell from Eastenders, and Miranda Richardson is truly venomous (or rather her character is - I won’t hear a word said against Queenie!) Oh, and, somewhat unusually, Aidan Turner finds an opportunity to get his top off (I think may have been treating his role as a callous mercenary as a 007 audition - good actor, but not sure he has the presence).

The action is spread over 3 hours, which is quite a lot for a slender novel, but this actually works pretty well as it serves to prolong and heighten the tension (although there may have been one or two flashbacks we could have lived without - I guess we’re just lucky that Peter Jackson didn’t get his mitts on it). All in all I would put this one down as a success (albeit a bit dark for Christmas), although it lacks the charm of the 1945 version, which in my book remains as close to definitive as we are likely to get.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I won’t go on too long about this one as I suspect that most readers might have heard a bit about the film already (and some of you might even have seen it!) I must admit that after the prequels I was working very hard not to get my hopes up, especially as I haven’t been a particular fan of JJ Abrams’ previous work (I got lost during Lost, probably because I made the foolish decision to try to dip into it in the middle of the run, and while the Star Trek remake was OK, I thought that Leonard Nimoy was by far the best thing in it, and when the best thing in your reboot is the character from the original, you know you’re in trouble). 

Actually, my view is that the prequels are not quite as bad as everyone says they are and they do have their moments (Christopher Lee vs Yoda, anyone), BUT they don’t hold a candle to the originals. One of the most telling comments about the prequels came from the “fan” who challenged anyone to describe any of the characters without using a physical description or describing “what they do”. With the original trilogy this exercise is fairly easy, but with the prequels it is nigh on impossible (which is a particular shame when one considers that the main characters are just younger versions of the iconic characters brilliantly fleshed out by James Earl Jones and Alec Guinness in the originals, people who we just “knew” from their performances had intriguing backstories - we didn’t NEED to see those backstories and perhaps it would have been better if we hadn’t). Guinness in particular was a master of the “show, don’t tell” technique - he was able to tell the story of the prequels infinitely better in a few seconds with a pained pause and a raised eyebrow than Lucas did in three films, despite all the filmmaking magic at his disposal. 

Luckily JJ Abrams remembered to create real characters this time, meaning that the new characters of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), new baddie Kylo Ren (Adam Driver making Darth Vader look positively cuddly by comparison and giving the performance that Hayden Christensen SHOULD have given as Anakin in the prequels) and intrepid pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac, having to contend with more limited screen time than the other three as well as the fact that his character was named after a Teletubby), are all on course to become iconic characters in their own right in the same way that Luke, Han and Leia did back in the day. If anything, I found some of the “cameos” from the original cast a little distracting (I love R2D2 and C3PO to bits but they didn’t really add much here, especially given that the new droid BB8 is so charming). Having said that, Han and Chewbacca are given quite a lot to do (the latter even gets to engage in a bit of growly flirtation with Dame Harriet Walter, and both are a joy to watch (even if Harrison Ford does spend most of the film looking as if he’s just woken up from a nap). 

Ultimately I did find it all very exciting and entertaining despite certain feelings of deja-vu (discussed below) - my only other real criticisms were that (a) the happy ending from Return of the Jedi (otherwise known as Star Wars Episode VI: The All Powerful Intergalactic Empire Gets Itself Thoroughly Spanked by a Small Band of Ewoks With Sticks) is now completely ruined (I’m sorry but Han and Leia would NEVER split up so I’m going to pretend I just misheard those lines of dialogue) and (b) Abrams obviously doesn’t understand how fast light speed actually is (i.e. too fast to approach a planet or a Death Star if you don’t want to end up as flat as a pancake) any better than Lucas did, but if you can’t suspend your disbelief in a Star Wars film then when can you? 

What did surprise me is just how closely it mirrors the plot of the original film, with Han taking on the Obi Wan role this time round (always a strategic error and sadly this proves to be no exception) and Luke Skywalker looking set to be the new Yoda! Not that it really matters this time round - it’s a good formula so why not stick to it? Disney may run into trouble however if they make a habit of it - if they are planning to release a new Star Wars film every year they are going to have to work exceptionally hard to keep the franchise feeling fresh and original. It’s easy to get excited about this one given that its was the first film for 10 years (or 32 years if you really hate the prequels, or 35 years if you hate the prequels AND the Ewoks!) but the filmmakers won’t have that advantage next time. My own view is that a film a year is going to be serious overkill and it would have made more sense to stagger them (and if they start recasting characters I think they’ll really run into problems). Nevertheless, if they are all as good as this one (or even almost as good), I shall probably keep watching them anyway.

Leaders’ Debates: The Drinking Game

I must admit that I am considerably less enthusiastic about the prospect of the leaders’ debates (and the multiple “pseudo debates” that will accompany them to keep the “minnow parties” happy) this time around than I was when it was introduced as a shiny new concept (in UK terms at least) before the last election. It’s not just that I am jaded by David Cameron’s nakedly transparent attempts to duck the debates and then giving into them (thus managing to get the worst of both worlds) or even Alistair Campbell’s brazen attempts to differentiate this from the “totally different situation” in 1997, 2001 and 2005 when Tony Blair did exactly the same ducking and diving routine.

No, the problem is that by the end of the last campaign I was starting to feel that the election had really been all about the debates and not much else (well, apart from Gordon Brown gratuitously insulting old ladies and then getting down on his belly and grovelling to them embarrassingly in a forlorn attempt to dig himself out of yet another hole). I am not altogether comfortable with this - our collective fate as a nation over the next five years should come down to more than whether Nick Clegg (or whoever) has a good night, comes up with some witty one liners and (the ultimate test of whether a man or woman is fit to be Prime Minister) blows everyone’s minds by…looking straight at the camera when answering a question (or rather, answering a slightly different question that he has prepared an answer to earlier).

Ultimately the debates are just another symptom of the increasingly presidential nature of our Parliamentary democracy. Whilst I am not sure that I necessarily yearn for the good old days when Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, would cheerfully start a war or two before breakfast without his Prime Minister being any the wiser, my real concern about moving to a presidential system is that I don’t think I could cope with having a Vice President!

Let me explain. Whilst I find American politics endlessly fascinating, I do sometimes look on with pity at our cousins across the pond when, every four years, they not only have to go through the gruelling ordeal of watching an endless succession of presidential primaries (which essentially amount to little more than beauty contests for overweight millionaires), but then, when the presidential nominees for each party are finally locked down, then have to endure months of speculation as to who those nominees will pick for Vice President from incredibly earnest commentators who are thinking about the whole question a lot more deeply than the nominees themselves are (and indeed a lot more deeply than is probably healthy). If it is a young nominee, will they pick someone older to bring experience to the ticket? If it is an older nominee, do they need to pick someone from the “next generation” to pass the baton to when the time is right. Does there need to be regional balance? Should they be picking someone from a swing state? Does the ticket lack foreign policy experience?

Then, invariably, word spreads via a flurry of texts that the presidential candidate has made his decision, the announcement is made, and the candidate walks on stage accompanied by a total plonker who no-one has ever heard of with a rictus grin utterly devoid of intelligence, and strange, staring eyes (with nothing much in between them). The candidate then solemnly announces that he has weighed up all of the considerations referred to in the paragraph above, but has ultimately decided instead to go with the total nutjob standing next to him, on the basis that he really, really doesn’t want to get shot.

Sadly, however, the trend towards presidentialism looks set to continue. It used to be the case that the Prime Minister was just the most senior of five or six “big beasts” in the cabinet at any one time. Now, thanks to the reduced number of really substantial government jobs available, due to the last Labour government splitting up the Home Office and Prime Ministers like Blair (and to some extent Cameron) deciding to run foreign affairs themselves (and largely mucking it up), it is safe to say that the big beasts have almost all left the building and Toad Hall is instead crawling with weasels running amok.

With that gloomy thought in mind, I thought I would take steps to make the whole business a little less unbearable by creating a drinking game to take the sting out of the sheer smugness, pandering and one-upmanship that these debates are likely to be characterized by. Due to the responsibilities of fatherhood I am unlikely to be able to participate in this game myself with the requisite amount of gusto, but that is no reason to stop my younger and more irresponsible readers from having a good time (hey, it’s a lot easier to fall in love with politics when there are copious quantities of booze involved!)

Disclaimer: if you take this too literally it will probably kill you!

The rules are simple – you must drink whenever:

1.  Anyone says “I agree with Nick” or “I disagree with Nick”;
 
2. Any of the leaders commit to a policy on the spot that they had not previously committed to;
 
3. Any of the leaders talk over any of the others (double measures if the interrupted leader says “Can you let me finish?”);
 
4. Anyone uses the phrase “I’ll take no lectures from…”;
 
5. Anyone describes one of the other leaders as a “lame duck” or “poodle” (double measures for “Lame Poodle”, triple for “Jemima Poodle-Duck”);
 
6. Anyone says that “war should always be the last resort” (double measures if anyone challenges this statement and says that, in fact, war should always be the first resort);
 
7.  David Cameron refers to his “long term economic plan” or the “big society";
 
8.  George Osborne is mentioned by anyone;
 
9. Anyone makes a joke about Ed Balls (double measures if it is a “balls” joke);
 
10. Anyone makes a fish joke about Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond;
 
11. David Cameron refers to Ed Miliband failing to mention the deficit in his last conference speech;
12. Anyone mentions David Cameron’s futile attempts to dodge the debates;
 
13. Ed Miliband refers to the “cost of living crisis” or “broken Britain”;
 
14.  Ed Miliband uses the phrase “one nation”;
 
15. Anyone refers to Ed Miliband looking like Wallace from Wallace and Gromit (double measures if it’s Ed himself);
 
16.  Anyone refers to Ed Miliband as “David” (triple measures if it’s Ed himself);
 
17. Anyone gets anyone else’s name wrong (regardless of whether or not that person is present or absent, alive or dead);
 
18.  Anyone starts their response to a question from the audience by repeating the audience member’s name to show how “in touch” they are (double measures if they get the name wrong, triple measures if they get the gender wrong);
 
19.  Nick Clegg uses the word “fairer”;
 
20. Nick Clegg sighs or pulls his “sad panda” face when anyone disagrees with him;
 
21. Nigel Farage mentions the EU;
 
22. Any of the other leaders roll their eyes when Farage mentions the EU;
 
23. Nick Clegg claims that 3 million jobs would be lost if we left the EU;
 
24. David Cameron claims that a vote for UKIP makes a Labour government more likely;
 
25. Nigel Farage responds by using the words “Vote UKIP, get UKIP”;
 
26. Anyone uses the phrase “revolution” or “revolutionary” in a context that sounds distinctly un-revolutionary;
 
27. Natalie Bennett is not able to say what the cost of one of her policies is (or comes up with a figure that sounds dubious or made up);
 
28. Any of the leaders remind Nicola Sturgeon that the SNP lost the independence referendum;
 
29. Any of the other leaders calls Nigel Farage out for saying something offensive;
 
30.  Nigel Farage responds by claiming to be “plain speaking” or “telling it like it is”;
 
31. Nigel Farage makes a disparaging remark about Romanians;
 
32. Nicola Sturgeon or Leanne Wood say something about the English that they would probably have been terribly offended by if one of the English leaders had said it about the Scots or Welsh;
 
33. Leanne Wood says something in Welsh in an attempt to get some attention;
 
34. Natalie Bennett, Nicola Sturgeon or Leanne Wood make a snide remark about the fact that the other four leaders are male;
 
35. Any of the male leaders patronize any of the female leaders by calling them “dear”, “darling” or “love”;
 
36. Any of the other leaders accuse David Cameron (or Nigel Farage) of wanting to privatize the NHS;
 
37.  David Cameron makes a derogatory remark about the Welsh NHS;
 
38. Anyone draws a contrast between “investment” (good) and “austerity” (bad); or
 
39. Anyone tries to make a “topical” joke about a celebrity that goes down like a lead balloon.

You must finish everything in your glass if:

1. Any of the leaders resign on air;
 
2. Anyone storms out of the debate;
 
3. Anyone swears;
 
4. Anyone throws a punch;
 
5.  Any of the leaders tries to hug any of the other leaders;
 
6.  Nigel Farage lights a cigarette during the debate or comes on carrying a pint;
 
7. Nigel Farage acknowledges that a problem exists which has absolutely nothing to do with the EU or immigration;
 
8. Anyone asks Leanne Wood who she is;
 
9.  Nicola Sturgeon produces a bagpipe, seemingly from nowhere, starts playing it, and Ed Miliband starts dancing; or
 
10. Anyone turns to the person next to them and loudly asks “Sorry, did you just call me a c**t?”

Barcelona Blog

So, I am recently back from a most refreshing and delightful holiday in Barcelona with Julie and Junior. NB: I don’t always refer to him as “Junior” (I am not Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, much as I would like to age into becoming him!) but I thought I should withhold his name in case the poor wee lad gets embarrassed by his old dad’s bizarrely meandering blogposts in years to come and decides to take the wise step of distancing himself from them! Technically, given that he is a dual national and therefore the trip we took to the US for Thanksgiving back in November could be regarded as going to his “other home”, this was Junior’s first foreign trip (still not bad for a 10 month old), but we had confidence in his ability to put up with all the travelling required (after a seven hour flight to Boston, which he put up with almost no tantrums at all, two hours to Barcelona was a doddle).

Monday

We flew out via Southend Airport (there was barely room in this miniscule airport for all of our luggage but all in all it was pretty efficient – Julie left her scarf in the security area but fortunately discovered its absence before we flew off and all she had to do was go back up a single escalator to retrieve it – in Heathrow it would have involved a walk of at least twenty minutes), and arrived in Barcelona around lunchtime.

The meter in the taxi that drove us to the airport we had rented for the week had a small, elderly, extremely grubby Cookie Monster cuddly toy sitting on top of it. Junior is a big Cookie Monster fan, so at first I took this for a good omen. However, as the journey went on, given that the meter went up 0.05 Euro at a time, meaning that the total fee for the ride was moving inexorably upwards at a more or less constant rate, while Mr C Monster sat on top of it looking increasingly smug, I swiftly grew to resent the blue furred, googly eyed glutton. When I was a child I had always thought that Oscar the Grouch was the most reprehensible of Sesame Street’s denizens, but now with the wisdom of adulthood it has become clear to me is that he is just a harmless introvert with a few personal hygiene issues, while Cookie Monster’s rapaciousness and greed has led me to conclude that he is second only to housemate from hell “ASBO Ernie” in the Sesame Street league of infamy.

In spite of this, the final cost of the ride did not turn out to be too excessive (perhaps there was a discount for making us listen to a Spanish pop cover of “I never promised you a Rose Garden”) and the owner of the apartment was there to greet us. He was a very charming and helpful fellow (we booked via WaytoStay.com, btw, which we would highly recommend), who looked suspiciously like a stand up comedian who appeared in various posters all over town. I did not take the opportunity to question him over this resemblance as I am not “up” on the Barcelona comedy scene (surprisingly enough) so was not sure whether I would be mortally offending him, or indeed raking up a long term feud with a man who could well have been his ne’er do well twin brother. It is not the first time this has happened – the owner of the B&B we went to in Venice bore an eerie resemblance to the subject of one of the more sinister paintings in the Doge’s Palace (either it was an ancestor, or we were doing business with a very mild mannered vampire - I am still not sure which).

We definitely made the right call renting the apartment rather than going to a hotel – you get more space and it’s nice to be left to one’s own devices (especially with a baby). I enjoy a B&B stay as much as the next man but we also like finding interesting places for breakfast and we have an unfortunate record of running up against passive aggressive B&B owners who always feel the need to dwell on the fact that we chose not to avail ourselves of the second “B”!

After depositing our clutter in the apartment and letting Junior out for a bit of a crawl and a wiggle (he loved exploring the apartment but absolutely hated the bathroom – in fact he tried to get out of the bath on one occasion, which is not the best circumstance to discover that one’s child has developed the ability to pull himself up into a standing position!), we strapped him back into his sling (a fantastic contraption called a Manduca, which meant that we were able to roam around Barcelona “pramless”) and started off on a fairly aimless but pleasant “getting our bearings” ramble which took us to Parc de la Ciutadella, where we saw a lot of very large bubbles being blown.

Junior was mildly interested in these but as he was mainly concentrating on his breadsticks (a new discovery for him), he was not nearly as excited by them as a large hairy and enthusiastic wolfhound we came across, who clearly saw it as his responsibility to burst every single one of them (there was another dog with him who looked extremely embarrassed by the company he was keeping – I think he even rolled his eyes at one point).  There were all sorts of dogs being walked in the park, including one who was most definitely a cat (he gave us a wide eyed look as we passed him which could have signified anything from mild annoyance that he was being walked and treated like a dratted dog to a full blown existential crisis). There are some lovely fountains in the park, and if you are into large concrete statues of mammoths (and frankly, who isn’t?) you won’t be disappointed either.

Dinner on the first night was something of a disappointment, however. We were hungry and tired and disinclined to wait until the late hour that most locals eat their evening meal, so we wanted to find something that was open early and relatively close to the apartment. This we did, although they did not do English language menus or indeed speak any English, which we initially thought might count in our favour as it suggested a good non-touristy place which would serve authentic regional food. Then it dawned on us that the fact that neither of us have much Spanish might cause us a few problems. Julie’s grasp of the language is slightly better than mine - although I did briefly study it for about six months when I was 11 or 12, I only got to do half of the lessons that most of my classmates did as I was also taking Latin at the time. The fact that I managed to blag my way to 86% in the exam, through a mixture of guesswork and extrapolating from French, is a continuing source of pride but in fact was entirely down to the exam being entirely multiple choice, which would be fine if a bubble appeared next to Spaniards’ mouths every time they spoke with three possible translations of what they just said, but generally in practice this doesn’t happen.

I ended up with a seafood risotto type dish with copious amounts of squid ink, which was actually quite tasty (I was a little nervous as the only previous time I had been to Barcelona, everyone had come down with food poisoning, but I managed to dodge that bullet this time), but Julie’s meal had a distinctly gruel-like quality to it. We then went back to our apartment for an early night, watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona on our ipad as we fell asleep (an excellent film - after 40 years of making films about people being neurotic and shagging around in New York, it is refreshing to see Woody Allen really branching out and making films about people being neurotic and shagging around in other places!) Later in the holiday we started watching Biutiful, which is damn weird but packs a powerful punch (I’d watch Javier Bardem in anything, although if he turns up in Transformers 7 or “Fast and the Furious 9: Flogging a Very Fast and Very Furious Dead Horse”, I may revise this opinion!)

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning, after a delightful breakfast at the Café Zurich on the Plaza D’Espanya, we had our Spanish Civil War Walking Tour, which was recommended in Rick Steves’ guidebook (we are big fans of Rick and watched the episode of his travel show about Barcelona before we left – I am embarrassed to say that when we went to La Boqueria and actually saw in person the old chap at the famous Tapas bar there who had been mugging gleefully for the cameras in the background of the documentary we got inordinately excited as if we were meeting royalty). It is run by a fantastic historian called Nick Lloyd who reminded me of a small, bald, intense version of Bernard Cribbins (but younger, obviously – Cribbins being approximately 3 years older than God).

Were it not for this tour we could quite easily have gone through our entire trip without ever once thinking about the Spanish Civil War, so invisible are the few remaining traces of that remarkably unpleasant conflict, a fact that many on the tour, including our guide found inexplicable. I must admit I agree with them – I found myself almost hurling the remote at the TV a few weeks ago when “Big Talk” (sorry, “The Big Questions”) did a section on whether it was time to forget about the Holocaust. I was amazed that the BBC saw fit to give airtime to such a facile and idiotic question. How can we learn from history if we simply brush it under the carpet?

Having said that, the tour did not shy away from the atrocities committed by the Loyalist side either, although Nick did expose a Francoist fib about the markings on the wall of the St Felip Neri church being created by the bullets from machine guns used to execute any priests unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. In fact the damage was caused by shrapnel from falling bombs (neither side in this war was particularly cuddly, and the priests were certainly bumped off, but it was done more discreetly in the nearby hills) - one ex military man who had been on the tour recently had told Nick that if they had tried shooting the priests against the wall of the church, the gunmen would have ended up killing themselves when their bullets ricocheted.

All in all it was not a barrel of laughs, safe to say, especially as it turned out that one French chap taking the tour had a grandfather who was caught up in the war and ended up fleeing to France only to be turfed into a labour camp by the Nazis a few years later where he died (there was even a suggestion that he was not quite dead when they put him in the incinerator). Even Nick was moved to tears by this story, even though he is hearing stories almost as unpleasant all the time on his other tours.  But I can honestly say that I have rarely been as impressed as I was by Nick’s ability to bring history to life with remarkable vividness (Simon Schama, look to your laurels!) and I would vigorously urge anyone visiting Barcelona to book themselves onto a tour.

Nick even gave Junior a couple of toy cars, although older attendees shouldn’t count on similar acts of generosity! He had a four year old who was getting too old for toy cars (we may soon need to build an extension purely to house all the cars we have had foisted on us recently from people with four year old children!) We had of course brought along the little lad’s “singing” Fire Engine and Police Car to entertain him during our time in the apartment, which, as you can imagine, never get irritating at all. The Fire Engine appears to harbour operatic ambitions, although he also apparently “loves to race”, which I find slightly reckless and disturbing. The Police Car, meanwhile, is unlikely to cause the criminal classes too many sleepless nights (OK, I wasn’t expecting it to growl “OI! THIS IS THE F***ING SWEENEY! YOU’RE NICKED!” in the dulcet tones of Ray Winstone – that would have been inappropriate - but the line “dial 999 and I will…catch the burglar” is delivered with all the menace of an adenoidal CBeebies presenter. So having a couple of “silent” cars for Junior to play with made for a refreshing change.

The tour also did a rather good job of showing us quite a few bits of Barcelona we had been intending to visit anyway, taking us past the great tapas restaurant Xaloc (just off the Ramblas) where we ended up eating dinner every night (plus the equally fabulous Gelateria “Manna” opposite – Manna from Heaven indeed). After the tour we took a ramble down the Ramblas, which led us to the statue of “Cristobal Colon”, aka Christopher Columbus, ironically perhaps the one man who did more harm to Barcelona’s economy than Franco did due to his “rediscovery” of the Americas (I use that word deliberately due to the number of historians and ASNACs I know who would start trumpeting the cause of Leif Erikson otherwise – if there’s one thing worse than crossing a Viking it’s crossing a Viking enthusiast!). And of course there is the small matter of the Native Americans who had been there for millennia and who had presumably therefore discovered it at some point….frankly, Columbus was something of a Johnny Come Lately when you think about it (am I the only person under seventy who uses that expression?)

Then we moved on to the harbour, wonderfully designed (for a moment it almost felt like we were in a Hispanic Sydney Harbour) and still retaining the wonderful feeling of freshness and vitality it must have had during the 1992 Olympics, which of course had a wonderfully regenerative effect on the city including this area. Then back up to the Café de l’Opera for a coffee served by a “wacky” waiter who Junior resolutely refused to be remotely amused by.  After that we had rather run out of puff so took the Metro back to the apartment (stopping off at the supermarket – Julie always insists that visiting the local supermarkets and looking at what brands they have to offer is an essential part of the tourist experience, which is fair enough, and Junior didn’t mind as he got lots of breadsticks out of it to munch on – he packed away a lot more food on this trip generally than we have ever seen him eat before, which is hardly surprising given the quality of our meals).

NB: Barcelona’s Metro system is extremely clean and efficient and boasts a remarkable variety of gargantuan vending machines offering not just the usual drinks and chocolate bars but various bits of IT equipment and other accoutrements. My initial awestruck reaction was pretty similar to that of Djimon Hounsou in Gladiator on seeing the colosseum for the first time (“I never knew men could build such things!”) Even Junior, who screams blue murder every time we try to drag him onto the tube, was grudgingly impressed! It is worth noting that every single time we took the Metro in Barcelona, whichever of us was wearing Junior got offered a seat (take note London Tube Folk, chivalry is not dead everywhere!)

Wednesday

On Wednesday we had our “away day” to Montserrat, which offered some terrific views, an opportunity to hear their famous boy’s choir (L’Escolania) - and it turns out it was a good place to buy honey as well. It was however marred by the ghastly tourists who insisted on taking selfies with La Moreneta (12^th century wooden statue of the Virgin Mary) who almost had me wishing for the return of the Old Testament God (before they abolished the smiting and leprosy) as I have no doubt they would have ended up deservedly feeling the sharp end of a bolt of lightning back in the day!

The train journey out there also offered us our only chance this trip to get a look at the always lovely Spanish countryside (and, for me, an opportunity to re-read a bit of my favourite book set in Barcelona – “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon which is an utterly enthralling and fantastical tale involving a Barcelona based “Cemetery of Forgotten Books” and various sinister events that befall a young lad who picks up one particular forgotten book). We were sitting opposite a nice couple from Yorkshire on the way out, but luckily their accents were not too pronounced as I have discovered that the thing that above all else makes Junior descend into fits of uncontrollable laughter is me talking in an exaggerated Yorkshire accent with overly pronounced glottal stops (T’ Lion, T’ Witch and T’ Wardrobe) and I was afraid for a moment that he might start giggling at them and put their noses out of joint!

Thursday

On Thursday we had our “Gaudi” day, seeing the Sagrada Familia in all its glory, after much queueing, of course. I am not an enthusiastic queuer but for once I will say it was definitely worth it, although if anything I may have been more charmed by the Casa Batllo on the “Block of Discord” (which I will always think of as the “George and Dragon building”). We also hopped on the bus up to Park Guell, which was worth a visit although I wouldn’t recommend that you linger in that rather insalubrious part of town for long afterwards as it's a little short on charm.

I believe that was also the day we saw the lady on the Metro who had forgotten to put most of her clothes on (that sounds facetious but that was actually what it felt like – she displayed no other signs of exhibitionism and behaved in all other outward respects like just another slightly hurried and frustrated commuter on her way to an important meeting – she may even have been carrying a filofax!) She was wearing a coat and stockings, I should add (albeit that was about all), and before the chorus of “ooh, but why were you looking” start up, I should point out that (a) Julie spotted her first and (b) the back of the coat was more revealing than its wearer probably thought it was – it was hard to miss even for someone as notoriously unobservant as myself.

Friday

Friday was our arty and walking day – we did a couple of the Rick Steves recommended walks (yes, him again, sometimes I wonder whether we should take the next logical step and just invite the man on holiday with us, considering he is so damn good at knowing what we want to get out of our breaks!) In the morning we did the El Born walk (during which we popped into the Picasso Museum and purchased a Picasso inspired rubber duck from the store – not quite as disturbing looking as you might think!) Junior was a big fan of Picasso (and the duck), which was a pleasant surprise to me as he had definitely taken the view the day before that Gaudi was a bit “maverick” for his tastes. In the afternoon we did the walk around the Gothic Quarter (which we preferred to El Born, although I can imagine that the latter would appeal in the height of the tourist season when it is probably a bit quieter than the touristy bits). I particularly enjoyed finding the Temple of Augustus (one of my all time favourite ancient tyrants!)

In the evening we popped up Montjuic to have a look at the Miro collection. I remember giggling my way round this exhibition on my first visit to Barcelona as a philistine youth many years ago when I was a touch cynical about “modern art” and the uncanny resemblance it bore to the stuff I used to churn out in bulk in kindergarten. My crowning moment of glory was when I inadvertently leant on one of the exhibits thinking it was a piece of furniture (but then I have never pretended to be anything other than a thoroughly clumsy oaf – I was once given the nickname of “The Fall Guy” in Maori by a tour guide when travelling in New Zealand, and only this week I managed to get blood and coffee on the same legal document – both mine, I hasten to add, but separate spillages (no serious harm done except to my little finger)!

This time round, I found myself absolutely loving Miro! Yes, bits of it are funny, but they are supposed to be (or at least I assume so)! The man was a creative genius with an astonishing vision and I feel terribly sheepish for ever having scoffed at his magnificent life’s work – he was clearly a man who enjoyed what he did! I particularly loved the big 400 square foot tapestry at the beginning of the exhibition, woven to look like a huge colourful painted canvas (there used to be a similar one in the Twin Towers, which Julie remembers once seeing, but it was destroyed in 9/11).

As it was after 6pm there weren’t many people around at the exhibition so it was nice and quiet, but we kept the visit fairly brief as we wanted to see the nearby “Magic Fountains” at 7pm. This a fun and colourful water show near the Plaza D’Espanya (in the summer they do it every night) accompanied by various pieces of classical and modern music – I enjoyed the John Barry but we moved on when Celine Dion piped up! Then off for a final dinner at Xaloc and a final gelato to follow before an early return on Saturday. Luckily we got one final breakfast at the airport - even Julie, who is not a big breakfast person generally, was almost in tears once we had finished it, as our breakfasts on this trip were some of the best we have ever had (Barcelona seems to specialize in delicious chocolate pastries). We arrived back in the UK just in time to listen to the News Quiz on the way home – what better way to round off a holiday?

Peter Jackson's made that film again: Review of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Well, I reviewed the first two films, so I feel that if I didn’t review the third one this rather Vesuviusesque blog (dormant with occasional violent bursts of energy, albeit perhaps not quite as magnificent as that fine volcano, which I have visited - indeed once in my heady and foolish youth I tried to set off the earthquake/volcano monitoring machine that they have there by jumping up and down next to it) would look even more patchy and incomplete than it does already. Besides, having come this far, it is only right to see things through to journey’s end, like Bilbo did, and let all four of my regular readers know what I thought of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

In short, it does what it says on the tin. Anyone expecting a radical and revolutionary departure from the tone and style of the five previous Peter Jackson Middle Earth films will find themselves disappointed (and rightly so, as they would be idiots). It is safe to say that Peter Jackson did not see the one line description of the aforementioned battle in the book and say “righty-ho, I’ll just skate over that one then”.

No, this is a film about a battle, and the battle takes up most of the second half of this film, although as Jackson finally managed to work out where the editing room was and achieve what many thought him no longer capable of, namely making a film that was less than two and a half hours long, it actually does not feel as interminable as one might initially think. There should, however, have been a notice before the start of the film saying “Warning: Contains large doses of Orlando Bloom gratuitously prancing around like a prat and whipping out a series of increasingly preposterous fighting moves”.

I appreciate that this is a fantasy film, but the “preposterous” factor really has been turned up to 11 throughout this trilogy. Whilst I would not describe LOTR as “grounded” exactly, whilst watching those films you did not find yourself constantly looking up at the screen and thinking “OK, that was just ridiculous” in the way I found myself constantly doing for much of the Hobbit trilogy. Someone really needed to rein in Jackson’s love of CGI and crazy stunts, but alas the great man was let loose to throw generous dollops of both at his increasingly bemused audience.

That said, whilst I agree with the general consensus that LOTR was the superior trilogy, these films are not entirely lacking in heart, and whilst some of the lesser characters are given short shrift (in this film even more than the previous two – less than half of the dwarves even have lines this time round, and poor old Bombur managed to get through the whole trilogy without opening his mouth except to breathe or eat cheese!) the three lead performances are spot on.

It goes without saying that Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey is as warm and reassuring a presence as ever and his chemistry and rapport with Martin Freeman here will make the scenes he has with Ian Holm as the older Bilbo in Fellowship of the Ring even more pleasurable on repeat viewings. Freeman, who with his delightfully varied performances in this trilogy, Sherlock, and Fargo has finally shaken off the spectre of “Tim from the Office” which I once feared would be with him for life, not only gives a delightfully nuanced and humorous performance as Bilbo (knocking Elijah Wood’s Frodo into the proverbial cocked hat) but is wonderful at bringing out the best in other people’s performances as well, especially the film’s third lead, who gets the most fleshed out character arc of all and is arguably both this film’s central protagonist and, for the first half at least, its principal antagonist, namely Richard Armitage as Thorin.

Speaking as someone who was initially rather surprised to see this strapping, handsome, six foot two, fortyish Sean Bean-alike cast as Tolkien’s gnarled and stubborn old dwarf king, I must admit that Armitage’s performance has completely won me over, even though I maintain that they could have made more of an effort to make him look like a dwarf, and part of me is still aching to see what Guillermo Del Toro’s alleged first choice Brian Blessed would have made of the role (ultimately I suspect that this choice would have been vetoed anyway, as the scenery here is rather too expensive for the producers to let an elderly bearded ham loose to chew on it with reckless abandon, as Blessed undoubtedly would have done).

Armitage is actually in my view more sympathetic here, as the dragon sickness goes to work on Thorin’s increasingly paranoid and unstable mind, than he was in the first two films, where he seemed rather unnecessarily churlish and truculent (true, this was also true of his literary counterpart, but film Thorin is clearly considerably more intelligent than book Thorin, so one feels that he should really have known better).

Still, the grumpy dwarf comes good in the end and joins the fray on the side of the goodies, only to meet his maker shortly after FINALLY dispatching the trilogy’s entirely unnecessary “bonus villain”, Azog the Defiler, presumably the Orc equivalent of Jaws from the Bond films due to his persistent refusal to die when he is supposed to, but who finally bites the dust in an epic battle on a lake of ice (which was great, even though as a connisseur of “fights on ice lakes” I personally prefer the more bumbling approach which was taken by Richard Lester in the Four Musketeers). I am pleased to report that due to the brilliant performances of Armitage and Freeman, Thorin’s death hits you just as hard as Boromir’s did in LOTR. 

As for the rest of the battle, well, it is certainly suitably grand and epic, even if it is all a bit too CGI for some, and there is an element of “Anchorman 2 with Orcs” due to the sheer number of characters who suddenly pop out of nowhere to proclaim variations on the “No-one starts this fight without me” theme. Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Lake Towners, More Orcs, Eagles, Radagast, Beorn, Even More Orcs, Billy Connolly, Billy Connolly’s Giant Pig, and, rather randomly, some weird burrowing worm creatures that appear to have been borrowed from Dune, all of them get a look in, albeit only briefly in some cases (having bemoaned Beorn’s limited screen time in Desolation of Smaug, I am sorry to report that it is even worse here – he actually gets almost as little screen time as I did as a film extra when I appeared as Charlie Weasley in Harry Potter 3. Having said that, he does at least utilize his six seconds on screen to maximum dramatic effect by turning into a bear and getting stuck into some serious orc slaying, whereas all I got to do was stand around in a fez looking like a bit of a tit, so on balance I think he still wins!)

As for Billy Connolly (as Thorin’s even more cantankerous cousin, Dain Ironfoot, aka The Wee Yin), I think it would be more accurate to say that what we are really seeing is Billy Connolly playing Billy Connolly playing Dain, in what appears to be a rather belated audition for Braveheart. That said, it was not even the real Billy, as he appears to have been entirely replaced by, yes, more CGI, for reasons which are not entirely clear to me. I know he’s not in the best of health, but replacing live actors with CGI imagery has up to now generally been used only to finish off scenes where the actor has died in the middle of shooting, like Oliver Reed in Gladiator or Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Hunger Games 3. If they are going to start using it where the actor is just looking a bit rough round the edges, I fear we will soon be sliding down a proverbial slippery slope (the worst kind of slippery slope there is - apologies for the number of proverbs/clichés in this review btw, but I didn’t get much sleep last night!)

Having said that, Connolly does at least add a bit of light relief to the proceedings, even if the swearing seemed a bit out of place (Billy has it written into all his contracts that he has to swear at least three times in every film he is cast in, which is why the screenplay to Muppet Treasure Island was famously rewritten by Quentin Tarantino). Here his expletives are fairly mild - he limits himself to a “sod”, a “bugger” and a “bastard” (which was coincidentally also the title of Billy’s version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), but I suspect that JRR Tolkien would still have disapproved.

The film’s other “comic relief” is a distinctly less welcome presence. Apparently some bright spark came up with the idea that the real reason that the crowds came flocking to see Desolation of Smaug was not the Elves, Hobbits and Dragons and things – no, they were really there to see the scenes with Ryan Gage as Alfrid, Stephen Fry’s sniveling weasel of a sidekick with the bad teeth.

This supremely annoying character had “Dragon’s lunch” written all over him in the last film, which is why I was so surprised to see that, unlike the congenial QI host, he not only survived Smaug’s attack but proceeded to hang around for the entire film like a bad smell that won’t go away, mugging away and even resorting to cross dressing in his persistent but futile attempts to generate a laugh from the audience and hogging what seemed like endless hours of screen time that could have been much better spent on poor ignored Beorn or other characters who actually APPEAR IN THE BOOK.

It’s not really Gage’s fault, he is a fine actor who is doing the best with weak material, but being stuck with a character who is essentially the bastard offspring of Grima Wormtongue and Jar Jar Binks does not help him to make a good impression. Whoever had the genius idea of ramping up this one note little rodent’s screen time so that he’s practically in the Hobbit more than the bleeding Hobbit himself, should be served to Smaug at the earliest opportunity.

The revolting little rat is even rude to Gandalf at one point, and (bearing in mind that Mr Connolly has already opened the Middle Earth Swear Box) I suspect that the grey wizard would have got an almighty cheer from the audience if he’d just turned around and retorted “Alfrid, you’re not funny and you’re not in the book, so why don’t you just f**k off?”

That really takes care of most of the negatives, although I also thought that the elf-dwarf romance thing between Kili and Tauriel was a bit on the heavy-handed side this time, and in fact the screenplay is pretty uneven throughout. Lines like “Those bats were bred for only one purpose!” “What?” “WAR!” would have sounded pretty ridiculous even if Orlando Bloom had not delivered it in such a wooden and awkward way. Having said that, Jackson’s team does have one genuinely excellent screenwriter in their ranks, namely one JRR Tolkien, and Jackson certainly knows how to milk those lines which were lifted verbatim (or almost verbatim) from the book for maximum dramatic impact (Thorin’s last lines and Gandalf’s last words to the young Bilbo, in particular).

Other bits I liked were:

-       the brief but energetic scenes with Elrond, Galadriel and Saruman taking on the Nazgul (if you are harbouring any doubts that the 92 year old Christopher Lee is in fact a real vampire, just watch him pull out his finest kung fu moves in this film, although I am willing to admit that he might have had just a tiny, tiny bit of help from stunt doubles and the ever present CGI team!);

-       the opening sequence, with a brief but delicious return from Benedict Cumberdragon, who gets a chance to incinerate some peasants and throw out a few more malevolent one liners before getting himself killed, really rather easily given all the build up, at the hand of Bard the Moustachioed Welshman, who loses his bow and so has to slay the dragon using his own son’s shoulder to fix his aim (did I mention that elements of this film are ever so slightly preposterous?); and

-       the ending, which is a marked improvement on the ending of The Return of the King in that (a) amazingly, it does not involve any slow motion shots of crying Hobbits AT ALL and (b) it does not include anyone gratuitously bursting into song at their own coronation (having said that I would absolutely love it if Prince Charles did a bit of singing in elvish when his big day finally comes!). The scene where all of Bilbo’s possessions are being auctioned off is handled brilliantly, starting off as a comic interlude but with the tone becoming rather more wistful and serious once the little hobbit gets back inside and finds his beloved home almost completely empty. It almost feels like Jackson’s belated homage to the Scouring of the Shire sequence from LOTR which was never filmed. Then of course Martin Freeman turns back into Ian Holm and the whole trilogy slides seamlessly into the beginning of LOTR.

Having now seen all 3 films, my feelings are mixed. On the one hand, it is a shame that there are no more Middle Earth films to look forward to on the horizon (although I suspect that the Hobbit may well be remade, probably as one film, in a few decades time, although whether the makers will be brave enough to follow it up with a LOTR remake is another matter).

It is true that I haven’t seen any of the Hobbit Extended Editions as yet, so there is still that to look forward to. I am told that the Desolation of Smaug Extended Edition features a cameo from none other than Sir Antony Sher, playing Thorin’s bonkers and doomed father, Thrain (which is rather exciting from my perspective, as I am slightly acquainted with one of Sir Antony’s old flames – it is not everyone who can say that they know Thorin Oakenshield’s father’s ex-boyfriend!) But this feels like the end of a journey I have been on for at least 16 years (when I found out they were making LOTR) or possibly even 25 years (since I was first read the Hobbit) and it has left me feeling rather wistful.

I also went into watching this film from a slightly different perspective to the others, in that I have this year become a father, and one who is looking forward to bringing the various peoples of Middle Earth to life for my son in a few years time when I read him the books. Whilst LOTR (the book) is more grown up in tone anyway, and the films suitably reflect this, I do feel it is a shame that there is no film version of the Hobbit which is a little less brutal and violent and more accessible to kids than the one we have (I am not counting the godawful Rankin Bass cartoon). Of course my “dream version” of the Hobbit, which would have been made in the 1980s and directed by Terry Gilliam or Rob Reiner, will never exist anyway. I guess that Junior will just have to use his imagination for a little while longer, which, all things considered, is no bad thing.

On the plus side, when we do come to watch all six films together in order as a family, although we will be “saving the best for last” with LOTR, I do feel that we will at least be able to watch the Hobbit films without them looking “so” much worse than their sequels as to make the comparison painful (like the Star Wars prequels do, for example). While Peter Jackson has not surpassed himself with his second trilogy, he has not dishonoured his own legacy either, and it is safe to say that I will be watching the films on a pretty regular basis going forward (there is a space already waiting on my shelf for the boxset). So on the whole, I think going “There and Back Again” was worth it. 

It's a Baby!

So, I do appreciate that this blog is so dormant that if it was a physical object it would probably have moss or lichen growing on it by now, but I did have grand ambitions to resurrect it as a “baby blog” to detail the trials, tribulations and exploits of my marvellous young son (suitably anonymised so as to minimise embarrassment for the wee fellow later in life). Such ambitions have so far been thwarted due to the fact that I have spent most of the six weeks since his birth either (a) holding a baby, (b) holding something else while Julie holds the baby or (c) investing in one of my periodic doomed efforts to catch up on sleep. So my baby blogging may be a tad sporadic, but I will try to get as many details of this extremely joyful but slightly exhausting time down as I can.

Junior was due on May 1^st aka Labour Day (which would have been quite ironic if it had come off). Coincidentally this is also my father’s birthday, which is even more ironic given that he is a lifelong Tory voter who would rather dig his own eye out of his face with a rusty shovel than vote Labour. On the subject of politics, incidentally, Julie and I took great pride in taking him (the baby, that is, not my father) out to the polling booth for the local and European parliamentary elections on May 22^nd (even putting him in his House of Cards themed onesie in an attempt to inject some fun into exercising one’s civic duty – although judging by his reaction to this year’s Eurovision winner, which involved copious amounts of projectile vomit, we’ll have to educate him out of any tendencies he might have to vote Ukip! Clearly our visit to the polling station was purely an attempt to get him into good habits while he’s young, and the boy won’t be able to vote in his own right yet, but the good news is that due to his dual citizenship, when he turns 18 he will be able to vote both in the UK and Massachussetts (just in time for the 2032 election between Chelsea Clinton and George P (“Son of Jeb”) Bush!)

Being our firstborn, and moreover a relatively placid, cheerful baby (with a penchant for baroque music, weirdly enough – anything post 1750 really didn’t float his boat while he was in the womb, though his tastes have thankfully broadened since), we were bracing ourselves for the likelihood that he would be arriving a few days late. Thus when we settled down to order a Thai takeaway and watch Les Miserables at 8pm on 26^th April, having just spent a pleasant afternoon in the company of some good friends followed by a quick stroll in Coldhams Commmon, Cambridge (near where we live), I was knocked for six when Julie calmly announced that her waters had broken.

What followed was my finest impersonation of Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army. “Right…don’t panic, DON’T PANIC!” I yelled. She wasn’t, and cheerfully suggested that I call to cancel our takeaway. I did so, although I managed to persuade her that it might be best then to call the hospital rather than wasting further time calling JustEat.com to secure a refund (we eventually did sort this out, but Julie did acknowledge that the baby was unlikely to halt its progress while we got our finances in order). At this point Julie’s contractions were tiny as well as few and far between, so by the time I had got us into the car and on our merry way to Addenbrooke’s Hospital (a short ten minute drive away, with not much in between except an absurd number of roundabouts) I was quite a bit calmer.

We arrived, and were greeted by a midwife called Christine (Chris) who promptly sent us home again (unfortunately Addenbrooke’s had lost Julie’s medical records, which did nothing to fill us with confidence). There followed a detour to Tesco on a hunt for maternity pads/underwear. By this time, however, faster and more painful contractions were already starting to kick in.

Navigating supermarkets has never been my strong point, and it was about 9:45 by this point so I do feel for the three Tesco employees, presumably winding down to go off shift, who were suddenly confronted by a panicking, red faced, arm flapping individual breathlessly insisting that they needed to help him as a matter of urgency because his wife was in labour. To her credit, the female assistant, who herself had 3 children, rose to the challenge admirably (while her male colleagues backed away with averted eyes) and I was in and out in about 5 minutes. By this time, however, it was clear that our plans for a sneaky McDonald’s meal would have to be put on ice and so it was that, before we’d even had a chance to get home again, and still distinctly dinnerless, we found ourselves driving straight back to Addenbrooke’s. This time, even the PG Wodehouse adaptation on the radio failed to soothe us (if the voice of Martin Jarvis doesn’t calm one down it’s a sure sign that something is really afoot), and by the time we arrived the contractions were agonizing, and coming every couple of minutes.

Luckily Chris was still on duty, and I can honestly say with hand on heart that I have never come across anyone before or since who is as good at their job as she is. She immediately took control and knew exactly what to say to Julie throughout the process (which is more than can be said for me…I erred on the side of “silent support” throughout the process, which Julie subsequently told me was all for the best!) and took us up to the Lady Mary Ward. We were not able to use the normal delivery units as Julie had been (erroneously, as it subsequently turned out) diagnosed with a mitral heart prolapse some years before, meaning that we needed to use the emergency unit to be on the safe side. In truth however we would not have had much of an opportunity to avail ourselves of the rather swanky (is that still a word?) facilities of the normal units in any event. It turned out this baby was definitely not messing about!

Julie coped remarkably well and there was not nearly as much “biting my head off” as I had expected there to be, in spite of the fact that labour progressed very quickly indeed, which was great in one sense but did mean that there was very little time to recover or take a breather between contractions (which were back contractions, and so were pretty unpleasant). Even more impressive wasthe fact that she managed to get through it all without any form of pain relief (she took one inhalation of gas and air and decided that any more would make her gag). She did end up plumping for a water birth (despite having been skeptical of these during most of her pregnancy) albeit that she ended up having to stand up at the last moment in order to get the baby out.  We would highly recommend it.

I am afraid that my first glimpse of my son was perhaps the most traumatic moment of my life. The poor little blighter, in his eagerness to get out and see the world, had managed to get over excited and turn over three times, meaning that the umbilical cord (a big thick one at that) had wrapped three times around his neck, which meant that he came out blue faced, in shock, and (as far as I could tell, at least) not making any sound. It turned out later that he was never in any real danger, as his heartbeat remained rapid and his initial Apgar score was a respectable 7, going up to full marks at 5 minutes and thereafter, but it was pretty frightening in the heat of the moment.

However, it turned out that all he needed was a bit of extra oxygen, which the paramedics quickly provided (swooping in from nowhere like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition and disappearing again just as quickly) and my most anxious moment quickly gave way to my happiest as the little lad got enough oxygen to scream and otherwise make his displeasure abundantly clear. Luckily Daddy was on hand, and the first thing I told him (after “Blimey, Junior, you really know how to make an entrance”) was that that was the most traumatic experience he would ever go through (which I understand is generally true of births) and that it was all “uphill from here” in the very best sense of the word. He calmed down remarkably quickly after his unpleasant ordeal, and by the time we had sung a few lines of “Anything Goes” (the ones we could remember) and he had had a bit of skin on skin time with his mummy, he actually seemed pretty cheerful.

We had not known whether it would be a boy or a girl, having decided to keep it a surprise, but once he was out and about there was certainly no ambiguity. As is often the case, Junior’s private parts (do they still count as private now I’ve blogged about them?) came out seriously swollen, and I am afraid that in the heat of the moment both Julie and I made slightly inappropriate comments – Julie’s was “those have GOT to be a pair of testicles” and mine (worse) was “Good God, they’re bigger than mine”.  Julie’s exhaustion was demonstrated by her not entirely accurate comment that “gosh, so he’s the first male Crockford since your dad!” Um…pretty sure you missed someone out there, my love!

Julie needed a couple of stitches but was able to keep baby on her chest for some bonding time while Chris saw to this. Junior, being a true Crockford, quickly decided that the best way to celebrate having come through that horribly traumatic experience was to have a big slap up banquet, and promptly started feeding. And kept going for most of the next 24 hours! He is clearly a comfort eater, but in spite of that he came out (and is still) very long and thin (like his parents) and although he weighed a chunky 8 lb 12 oz, the additional weight came from extra length rather than body fat.

After a few hours left on our own (which was very welcome) in the delivery unit with some toast and jam (also welcome in that we never had got our dinner), Chris came in, swaddled Baby and took us out into the main “recuperation area” with various other new mums. There we stayed from about 6:30am until about 8pm, which I have to say was not the most comfortable experience of my life (I was sat in an armchair right by the window being bombarded by the sunlight and feeling very overheated as well as extremely sleepy). Understandably, the Lady Mary Ward focuses on the well being of the mothers and babies rather than the dads, and whilst I freely admit that of the three of us I had had by far the least draining and traumatic experience, it was still a bit galling to have to buzz to be let back in every time I had to go to the toilet (which, as it was Sunday, meaning fewer staff, often took several minutes to be answered). Nevertheless, all had gone well and whilst we were exhausted and uncomfortable we were also extremely happy.

We took this opportunity to finally agree on the name. We wanted to wait to be sure until we had taken a few hours to get to know the little chap (although if we had based it on those few hours alone he probably would have ended up being called Snuffly Windypops Crockford, but luckily, being forward thinking folk, we had had a shortlist for both sexes, and it only took us a few hours to make a decision as to which one suited him best). We also told our parents the good news (but sadly my phone ran out of battery before we could disseminate the news more widely, although I just about managed to get a text out to my sister beforehand). And then we waited…

Personally I was very relieved when the powers that be at Addenbrooke’s finally decided that they had done all they needed to do to discharge us. We pretty much crashed as soon as we got home, but, as I suspect is the case for all new parents, the first few nights were pretty difficult, not because Junior was himself not sleeping (he is actually a very good sleeper, albeit a noisy one who likes to make animal noises in his sleep…at times it’s like sharing a bedroom with Gollum) but because as new parents we were not quite sure whether those noises signified breathing difficulties or whether (as in fact turned out to be the case) they were just “his thing”. I was particularly bad and had some extremely disturbing dreams – the worst one being when I woke up, handed Julie an object in a state of abject panic saying “This one’s really floppy! What’s wrong with him?” “That’s a cuddly toy, Alex”, Julie explained slowly, before gesturing in the direction of where the real baby was sleeping perfectly calmly.

Also, we had bought him a Moses basket to sleep in next to the bed, but it ended up being a bit problematic because we couldn’t see him so, especially in the frantic state our minds were in at the time, we had to keep getting up every few minutes and checking he was OK. We ended up hiring the NCT Bednest, which means that he is sleeping next to the bed at the same level as us so we can see him, but he is not IN the bed so won’t get squished when we roll over. I would highly recommend this fine contraption for all new parents.

My employers had very kindly allowed me three weeks off (my two weeks’ statutory leave plus another week of holiday) which went by disappointingly quickly but was great fun (albeit not terribly restful). Julie’s mother, Lucy, arrived from the US on the first Wednesday and stayed for over a month, which was fantastic both for her and for us (an extra pair of hands was a godsend and Junior got to spend some quality time with his Nana, which was lovely).

We didn’t venture very far afield during those weeks and still haven’t (his first trip to London is due this weekend) but we did get to the supermarket a couple of times in the first week and into central Cambridge a number of times in the second and third weeks (I particularly enjoyed showing him my old college about 8 or 9 days in). The baby likes travelling in our car (nicknamed “Father Jack” for reasons which I won’t go into here), or rather enjoys sleeping in the car (it is one of the few guaranteed ways of getting him off) but shares his father’s distaste for traffic jams and is not shy in expressing his displeasure when the car is not moving. 

Junior is a lively and affectionate lad, but it took him a couple of days to get the measure of me, I think, as I was clearly no help at all on the milk front and to start off with I was the one changing most of the nappies, a process he is not a huge fan of at all. But being a bright lad, I think he soon realized that there was more to things than the black and white picture of Julie as “the feeder” and me as “the manhandler” and that both of us were there to provide him with love and affection as well.

I cannot sing the praises of Cambridge NHS Trust highly enough and it was a huge weight off our shoulders to discover that we were to have midwives visiting us more or less every day during the first week to check on Baby. The midwives and health visitors have been uniformly excellent, and I am pleased to report that the little fellow is thriving and, after the standard weight loss in the first few days, started putting on weight again immediately and has now shot over the 5kg mark, and has overtaken our cat, Watson, in terms of weight (probably for good, unless Watson has a massive binge in a bid to stay competitive!)

Watson was initially a little nervous of the baby (probably smelling the blood from labour). He had been very fond of Julie’s bump, even allowing it to nudge and kick him while he was on her lap,  and I think his initial view was that we had made a poor trade in exchanging bump for Baby. I think he has probably now realized that the two are one and the same and whilst he doesn’t generally come too close to this strange noisy new addition to the household (thankfully), he has decided that the little chap needs protection and that Julie and I are decidedly not up to the task on our own. So he, together with his favourite toy squirrel sidekick (“Squeak”, a scruffy, blinded creature who has not actually been able to squeak for a couple of years but despite such shortcomings is the only person Watson would entrust with a task of this magnitude) camps out outside our room at night on “guard duty”. Fortunately he is now willing to actually let his guard down and go to sleep every once in a while – a sleep deprived cat is not a pretty sight (I swear there were bags under his eyes at one point!)

Now I am back at work, the rate at which Junior is growing is much more obvious to me (there are evenings when I have come home and could swear that he has grown an inch over the course of the day). Whilst he is still not a large chap, he has lost that “newborn” look, and it has become much more obvious at first glance that he is a boy. He still has a bit of jaundice but it was never serious and is now clearing up.

We have already got some smiles out of him (and something that sounded like a chuckle, although I think it was probably mimickry rather than a response to the rapier like witty banter you get in our house!) Even more fantastically, he is now able to roll over from his front onto his back, so he is nicely ahead of the curve on that one. Whilst I get the impression that he is more naturally “chilled out” than either of his parents, he is also a bit of a perfectionist and is already desperately trying to crawl, and bawling his head off about the fact that he can’t do it (I think “operation babyproofing” may need to be expedited).

In summary, fatherhood is fantastic, and I am hugely looking forward to doing more with the little fellow as he grows and develops. The wonderful thing is that all my favourite books, films, places etc are completely new to him (often I find myself wishing that I could forget reading books like Lord of the Rings so that I could experience them “for the first time again”, similarly with some of my favourite mysteries I would love to be able to forget the identity of the murderer and have another crack at guessing correctly). But at least I can experience at second hand his wonder and delight at experiencing all those things for the very first time (and no doubt he will enjoy many experiences of his own which I have never encountered myself). Exciting times! Watch this space for developments….