Wednesday

Over the Christmas period we watched Wednesday, the Netflix series in which Wednesday Addams is sent to Nevermore Academy — the boarding school for outcasts with which her parents have a long history. Here, as well as having to navigate the usual high-school cliches (all given a suitably macabre spin), Wednesday finds herself at the centre of a series of mysteries including murder, a monster and several attempts on her life.

It’s really good.

The series does take a bit of getting used to initially and this is not the Addams family we have come to expect. The family is a little more dysfunctional and I missed the sense of the Addams together, facing the world. And I have to admit that Luis Guzmán struck a slightly jarring note as Gomez Addams: He’s not Raul Julia.

That said, it is nice to see a series that attempts to be something more than a slavish retread of what has gone before, and Wednesday does work well as a new take on the Addams Family. A lot of this comes down to Jenna Ortega’s performance in the title role: She manages to channel all of Wednesday’s signature snark while also delivering enough depth to keep us all caring throughout the series.

And then there’s the dance.

Overall, Wednesday is a very well executed combination of Gothic mystery and school-age soap opera. The series is both funny and charming and is built around a mystery that is both intriguing and satisfyingly concluded.

I do hope that Wednesday returns to Nevermore for another term.

The spirit of Tony Hancock lives on

This is too wonderful for words. It turns out that almost all 57,000 articles in the Scots language version of Wikipedia were written, edited or overseen by a single person. Who doesn’t speak Scots.

That’s right, someone doing a bad impression of a Scottish accent and then writing it down phonetically is the chief maintainer of the online encyclopedia’s Scots edition. And although this has been carrying on for the best part of a decade, the world was mostly oblivious to it all – until today, when one Redditor finally had enough of reading terrible Scots and decided to look behind the curtain.

Emphasis mine.

My first thought when I read this was of Tony Hancock and, since everything is on YouTube these days, here is the scene I thought of:

It’s not clear whether the Wikipedian has spent the past near-decade creating thousands of fake posts as some kind of incredible practical joke, or that they honestly felt they were doing a good job. There have been occasional interactions with real Scottish folk taking exception to pages, and the administrator has responded in a dead-pan fashion.

I do hope that this is a joke — for the sake of the Wikipedian in question — because if he really is a latter-day Hancock then this is a screw-up of epic proportions.

Forty-Two

WordPress informs me that today is my forty-second day of continuous posting. Yes, I really have managed to spout some sort of drivel every single day for forty-two days (including today).

As everyone should know, Forty-Two is the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. This is doubly appropriate for me because, not only am I full of answers, but I also have no idea what any of the questions are.

There are many ways of celebrating an entirely arbitrary achievement such as this, but I intend to go find an olive so that I can finally mix myself a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Five Things #27

Song of the Water Bear by Laine Bell is a surprisingly effective story about tardigrades, from their own perspective.

I am constantly perplexed as to why so many people are people panic-buying toilet paper. Neuroscientist, Dean Burnett explains.

Sara Elsam talks to Games Workshop co-founder Ian Livingstone about fantasy, bringing D&D to the UK and the birth of Warhammer.

Kieran Fisher argues Buffy the Vampire Slayer Is the Perfect Binge Watch. This is part of a series, all of which is worth a look.

Dana Najjar considers the billion year algae that hints at the origin of land plants.

The Prisoner: Hammer Into Anvil

I have, over the past few months, been reacquainting myself with The Prisoner. This was a TV series, originally screened in the late 60s and repeated in the early 1990s which is when I first encountered it. I enjoyed it at the time and am now catching up yet again on DVD.

The series stars Patrick McGoohan as a spy who, after resigning for unexplained reasons, is kidnapped and transported to an isolated island community known only as The Village. This location is secured by a panoply of surveillance systems and hosts a population in which no-one uses names. All residents are assigned numbers — seemingly at random — which make it impossible to determine whether any individual is an inmate or a guard.

All of this is overseen by Number Two, a position filled by someone different each episode (which, I know, contradicts what I said in the previous paragraph — but there it is) who seeks both to extract information from the protagonist, Number Six, and possibly to recruit him into whatever mysterious organisation he represents.

Overall the series combines several genres in a manner that is surreal, often paranoid and devastatingly effective. The stand-alone episodes can be a bit variable from one to the next, but at their best they really are superb.

Which brings us to Hammer Into Anvil.

This episode opens with a sadistic Number Two (played by Patrick Cargill) driving another inmate to suicide. Number Six informs Number Two that he will answer for this and thus begins Number Six’s campaign to destroy his adversary.

What makes this episode so memorable is that rather than fighting against the system, as Number Six usually does, he instead manipulates it in order to turn the panopticon against itself. What’s more, he does this in a manner that is both playful and transparent. It is clear from the outset what Number Six is doing, but Number Two’s increasing paranoia, combined with his endless search for an underlying meaning — even when none exists — blinds him to the obvious.

This is the first episode in which Number Six demonstrates a sense of humour as well as being the first in which he is able to enact a retribution.

I still have five more episodes to watch, including the two-part finale, but Hammer Into Anvil is a definite high point of the series.

Five Things #24

In Fortune’s Final Hand Adam-Troy Castro envisages a casino in which memories can be gambled and asks how much of you would still be you if your memories once belonged to someone else.

Rich Pelley talks to David Jason and Brian Cosgrove about Danger Mouse.

Renewable energy still has a long way to go. Wednesday was Belgium’s Grey Day, the day when notionally the country’s green electricity production is used up.

Klaus Sieg visits Sirplus, a chain of German supermarkets selling expired yogurt, mislabled jam and weird potatoes.

Chris Grey argues Brexiters need to stop campaigning and start governing.

He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy

Terry Jones died yesterday at the age of 77.

I remember, many years ago, reading Starship Titaninic, a spin-off from The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy which Jones agreed to write on condition that he could do so in the nude. Or so Douglas Adams claims in the introduction to the novel.

Terry Jones is, of course, best remembered for being part of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and as the director of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which he also played Brian’s mum.

This, for my money, is one of the funniest films ever made — if not the funniest. So here is the highlight of a film full of highlights.

Il Mandaloriano

We don’t have Disney+ and we don’t have any intention on signing up to a streaming service anytime soon. Consequently, I haven’t seen any of the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian.

But if it was anything like this spaghetti-western inspired trailer, I would change my tune in an instant.

Five Things #7: Better late than never

This post has taken quite a bit longer to complete than I expected, so apologies in advance if a couple of the below links feel a bit stale. They’re still worth reading, though.

“Hence gradually the onion skins have been peeled away until the fetid heart of [Brexit] is exposed: not a policy but an undeliverable fantasy composed of lies and articulated in the language of spite, contempt and hate.” — Chris Grey on the Supreme Court judgment and its aftermath.

On a related note, Nick Barlow points out that democracy is a process, not an event.

I loved Spitting Image back in the day and was delighted to hear that the satirical puppet show is making a a comeback. Adam J Smith and Jo Waugh take this opportunity to point out that there has been a problem inherent in British caricature for 300 years.

Ben Orlin explains why 1 isn’t a prime number.

And Wumo explains the stock market:

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The Day Today

I’m a bit late to this but, last week The Day Today turned 25. This was a remarkably prescient parody of TV news and current affairs programmes of the time. There were only six episodes, the first of which was transmitted on 19th January 1994.

Jude Rogers in the New Statesman sums it up best:

The Day Today distilled the news’ budding obsession with outrageous visuals. Jeremy Vine on Election Night. Alan Partridge getting caught up in his multi-pronged SoccerMeter mirrors. Doon MacKichan pulling gore-splattered percentages out of a dummy’s intestines, to show the NHS’ decline, was this idea’s natural endpoint.

Then the team skewered news theme tunes. “TV was getting obsessed with the potential of computer graphics, and how music could underpin them,” remembers co-composer Jonathan Whitehead. The theme they made together is the show’s spirit in a perfect 25-second blast, beginning with the sound of a bomb (a graphic of a globe exploding alongside it) before string swoops and percussive stabs make it even more histrionic. “News was all about appearing complicated, important and serious. So we thought
we’d see how far we could go.”

And this is all the excuse I need to post this clip of WAR in which Chris Morris’ Paxmanesque anchor starts out with a segment on a trade agreement and manages to start a war.