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….

(Belated) review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Sherlock Season 3 Ep 1: The Empty Hearse

Hobbit

I can only assume that somewhere on the statute books there must be a convenient tax loophole which film directors can only benefit from if they cast Benedict Cumberbatch in absolutely every film ever (with an additional rebate if they also throw Martin Freeman into the mix). This is not a criticism of either actor, it has just struck me that they have been so prolific over the last year that they are starting to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt (or "Joseph Gordon blaaahdy Levitt" as I heard him described by a filmgoer weary of that fine actor's numerous appearances on a bus once) look like Daniel Day Lewis.

Cumberbatch's increasing fanbase among the young female filmgoing community also amuses me slightly bearing in mind that I still always think of him as the uptight quizmaster Patrick in "Starter for Ten" (still my favourite of his performances to date - his array of jumpers in that film are a darn sight scarier than anything you'll see Smaug do). But anyone who read the comments on youtube underneath the various Desolation of Smaug trailers would have to conclude that he is now a bona fide sex symbol. One particularly enthused "talk backer" announced gushingly that "Orlando is no longer the hottest person in The Hobbit". Poor old Orlando. Little did he know, in his LOTR heyday, that ten years hence his former fans would be dropping him like a stone in favour of a fifty foot scaly reptile with extremely dodgy breath!

Luckily Cumberbatch is as talented as he is busy, and his vocal performance as the gleefully malevolent dragon Smaug in The Hobbit 2 is one of the highlights of the film. A number of reviewers have compared him to George Sanders in The Jungle Book, but in truth Smaug is so gloriously evil that he makes Shere Khan look like Garfield. I suspect that in years to come his performance will be viewed alongside Sanders as Shere Khan and Jeremy Irons as Scar in the Lion King as one of the great villainous voice performances in film history (I have no idea why it is that an African lion, an Indian tiger and a dragon from another world all speak with silky posh English accents but anything else would seem somehow inappropriate).

Looking back on last year's review of The first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey, I think that because I felt that the savaging the film received from a lot of critics was unfair, I probably erred slightly too much on the side of putting a positive spin on the film's undeniable faults. So (says he, indulging himself in a pretentious rhetorical question), has Peter Jackson now fixed the various aspects of the franchise which the critics felt to be "broke"? The answer is "up to a point".

Firstly, the negatives. Leaving aside my mother's (entirely fair) criticism that "the dwarves could do with getting themselves haircuts", my biggest irritation with the film is that there are still too many sodding Orcs milling around. Moreover, the script is still pretty heavy handed, and Jackson & co's spatial awareness appears to be getting worse and worse. I have lost count of the number of times Bilbo and company should have died by this point, although at least we haven't had as many gratuitous "he fell off the cliff so he must be dead...waily waily waily...oh no, there he is" sub-plots which LOTR was riddled with (only one of which appeared in the book).

I was also underwhelmed by Gandalf's sub-plot (OK we get it, Sauron is coming back, we know that because we have already seen the trilogy set 60 years later in which he...comes back!) Ian McKellen is never anything less than a joy to watch (and I am particularly enjoying the fact that his pronunciation of "enemy" sounds more like "enema" with every passing film, which may go some way to explain his pained expression when he comes out with lines like "the enema is gathering in strength"). But basically all the poor chap gets to do in this film is wander around various ruins until he finds one which is haunted by an angry blob of darkness, which then proceeds to kick the crap out of him.

The Azog the Defiler storyline was surplus to requirements in An Unexpected Journey, but I was willing to forgive it on the basis that Jackson at least allowed the storyline fit around the bits that were taken from the book (which stuck pretty close to Tolkien's original work). In DoS, by contrast, entire sequences of the book are being rewritten to fit around the extra "Orc-y" bits.

In particular I felt that Beorn, the chap who lives in the woods and turns into a bear, was rather hard done by by the script. I didn't mind that his look was rather different from the big burly black bearded character in the book, presumably to avoid too many "Hagrid" comparisons. His new look was, er, creative (think Chewbacca if he decided to go for a full body shave but was interrupted halfway through and whisked off to an 80s era David Bowie concert) but I didn't mind it too much and I LOVED the design of his house. I also liked the fact that actor Mikael Persbrandt gave the character an interesting Nordic feel. Persbrandt is quite famous in his native Sweden for playing maverick cops and sharing a snog with Le Chiffre from Casino Royale in the film "Nu" (which is definitely not a biopic of the Teletubbies' vacuum cleaner, and if you thought you would never get to enjoy the spectacle of a Bond villain kissing a were-bear, you were sorely mistaken!)

But the poor chap only gets one scene in his human form, and not a single line taken from the book (all jettisoned in favour of yet more..."ooh, that Azog the Defiler's a bit of a dick" dialogue), which seems a little stingy when one considers how many dwarf songs we had to sit through in the previous chapter. True, that is still one scene more than Tom Bombadil got, but whereas Bombadil was always going to be a tricky character to translate onto the big screen (think Sir Harry Secombe on LSD) Beorn is a character who can really cut loose and kick ass (which is why it is so surprising and disappointing that he is reduced to sitting around and pontificating on the merits of veganism instead). Hopefully this is something which will be remedied in the final film.

There are also various new characters who get a bit more to do, played by up and coming young actors such as Lee Pace (Thranduil the Elven King, an intriguing and more morally ambiguous character than any of the other elves we have come across to date but handicapped slightly by a totally unnecessary disappearing scar and mannerisms which are uncannily similar to those of Matthew Macfadyen as Mitchell and Webb's pompous boss in the recent excellent BBC series Ambassadors) and Luke Evans (Bard the Bowman, who speaks with a Welsh accent just as he did in the BBC Radio version). One review I read got slightly confused between the two of them and indicated that Lee Evans had been cast as the Elven King, which would have been a sight to behold, but fortunately we are not completely bereft of British comedy legends, as Stephen Fry does make an appearance, as an STD-riddled version of Lord Melchett from Blackadder. Apparently next year's film will also feature Billy Connolly riding a giant pig!

Then of course there is Tauriel, the female elf who was conspicuously absent from the book. This is one of the "new bits" which I actually don't have a problem with and Evangeline Lilly manages to shine in the role despite the inclusion of an extra "elf-dwarf" love storyline with Kili, which is dealt with extremely clunkily, including a not particularly Tolkienic line about the contents of a dwarf's trousers (Romeo and Juliet, this ain't).

Notwithstanding the above I did thoroughly enjoy the film. The pace, which was perhaps the biggest problem of all with An Unexpected Journey, has picked up considerably here, as has the palpable sense of excitement and danger. The performances are pretty much universally excellent. The barrel sequence is an Indiana Jones-esque delight, especially when Bombur briefly turns into a "ninja Obelix". I didn't even mind Orlando Bloom shoehorning his way into it, in fact this is the first time for a while when I have actually been glad to see him. He still does that constipated face whenever he tries too hard to act, but he is clearly glad to be back in the green and "stunting around", and his enthusiasm is infectious.

And I have to come back to Smaug, for it is he, not Martin Freeman's increasingly heroic Bilbo nor Richard Armitage's grumpypants Thorin, who is the true star of the film. The final sequence, where he chases the dwarves around the Lonely Mountain before they mount the most expensive assassination attempt in cinema history by trying to melt a several hundred foot high solid gold statue of a dwarf onto him (think of how many schools and hospitals could have been built instead!), is both completely preposterous and utterly thrilling. Can't wait to see the dragon wreaking some serious havoc next year. And Billy Connolly riding that pig, obviously.

Sherlock

One thing I was hoping for in the scenes between Martin Freeman's Bilbo and Cumberbatch's Smaug was some sort of Sherlockian in-joke, bearing in mind that both actors appear in both "franchises". Peter Jackson is no stranger to the in-joke, as one of Sean Bean's first lines in LOTR was "still sharp" (or "still Sharpe" - there are also four or five references to Alec Trevelyan from Goldeneye seamlessly incorporated into the extended edition!) But if there was an in-joke I didn't spot it.

There was however no shortage of in-jokes in the first episode of Sherlock Season 3, the episode in which we finally, after an extremely tense two year wait, found out how Sherlock managed to fake his own death by plunging off St Bart's hospital. In fact, the whole thing could be argued to be one big in-joke at the fans' expense. Part of me was hoping he would just announce that he had been wearing a bouncy rubber suit, wink at the camera and get on with the show (or announce that he was in fact an indestructible scaly dragon in a Benedict Cumberbatch mask) just to hear the howls of online outrage.

As it happens, not all of the fans were satisfied, as the show's writers teasingly offered us not one but three possible explanations. "Which one is true?" screamed the fans. The fact that two of the explanations were clearly intended to be ridiculous joke explanations and the third was the only plausible one (I use the word "plausible" in the loosest possible sense, obviously) would lead me to throw one of Holmes' most famous lines back at those who are still confused: "When you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

So Sherlock is back with a bang, still as brilliant, clever, hilarious and infuriating as its lead character. The opening episode was not without its faults and occasionally went for the cheap laugh at the expense of believability (even by the standards of the exaggerated universe in which Sherlock and pals inhabit). Even if Mrs Hudson did think John was gay, would she necessarily blurt this out, bearing in mind that he clearly brought several girlfriends back to Baker Street in the first two seasons? And whilst it is nice to see the writers acknowledge that Mycroft is actually even smarter than Sherlock, something which was not made clear in seasons 1 and 2 (there was some great dialogue between the two brothers which neatly conflated some exchanges from two of Conan Doyle's original stories, namely The Blue Carbuncle and the Greek Interpreter), surely learning Serbian in a couple of hours would be too much even for that supercilious government operative?

I also felt that, while the original story on which the episode is based (The Empty House) devoted itself more or less equally between Sherlock's return and the actual mystery he had come back to solve, The Empty Hearse concentrated too much on the former, meaning that the ostensible plot of the episode, which consists of foiling a plan by a rogue government minister, who is in fact working for North Korea (as one does) to blow up the Houses of Parliament, was a fairly sketchy and uninvolving affair (not to mention a colossal waste of one of Conan Doyle's best villains other than Moriarty, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who was a sufficiently interesting character to make it into one of George Macdonald Fraser's fantastic Flashman novels, but who is rather boringly reinvented here as the aforementioned rogue minister).

But when there was so much to like, who cares? The script was laced with rapier sharp wit, there were some genuinely touching scenes not just between Sherlock and John but also between Sherlock and Molly and even Sherlock and Lestrade! The TV Sherlock has always been a more amoral, sociopathic character than his literary equivalent and at times I have felt that they have gone a touch too far in that direction, but it is clear from this episode that they are planning to develop the character over time so that he grows into a kinder and more emotional character, in other words, something more than a post British version of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. All of which promises to be terrific.

Amanda Abbington is extremely warm and believable as Watson's love interest (as well she should be bearing in mind that she is Martin Freeman's real life girlfriend) and I like the fact that they have allowed her character to be sufficiently generous to share her fiance with Sherlock (the last thing the series needs is another grump like Sergeant Donovan). The cameo by Cumberbatch's parents as Sherlock's surprisingly ordinary mum and dad was also great.

I am a little concerned that the series will struggle to find another villain as enthralling as Andrew Scott's unpredictable (and ever so slightly Graham Norton-esque) Jim Moriarty, but let's see where the next two episodes go. Let's just hope we don't have to wait quite as long for Season 4 - just three episodes per season is practically a form of torture (and I am sure that Messrs Cumberbatch and Freeman could find time in between filming the four hundred other films that they are signed up to in the next few years to squeeze in a bit more Sherlock!)