Sometimes I shouldn't use words

Indefensibly late but Happy (ex)Birthday counteragent!

TV I have watched:

A documentary about Factory records/Joy Division/New Order. Peter Hook (I think) had to say about Curtis (paraphrasing from memory) “we never really listened to the lyrics, thought it was just Ian being artistic.” Sad and utterly believable in such a matter-of-fact Northern-man way.

Ashes to Ashes both episodes now. Very different from Life on Mars, which I liked a lot. Sure it was flawed but it did manage to hit several nerves and the final episode came so close to making everything worth it. The new series seems completely meta in comparison, it’s not only about a woman spending her final moments trapped in her own “Gene” fanfic it keeps telling you in big stage whispers that that’s exactly what it is. It’s to admire at some intellectual level but the plausible deniability clause to every false seeming note (from the random way her ‘constructs’ sometimes behave or the lack of bemusement at what the new DI thinks counts as a working wardrobe for an officer in the Met) does feel like a cop-out.

This may be unfair, if I were to write LoM fanfic it would be Mary Sue/Sam not Gene (who always brought back too many memories of a particularly thuggish geography teacher) so the disconnect to DI Alex Drake could just be to her taste in fantasy men. Or it could be the time period, 1981 London just doesn’t have the nostalgic qualities that 1973 Manchester did. There’s never that sense of unexpected recognition that makes nostalgia fun - the early eighties were my locked away in college years so some of the cultural stuff I missed and the rest I remember without being reminded (and mostly rather I didn’t). It’s not a distant enough past to be another country and geographically it isn’t distant at all. This weeks episode had the additional weirdness factor of guest starring Rupert Graves who I know for a fact didn’t look or talk like that in 1981 because he was in the year below us at 6th form and already the star of numerous school assemblies.

Next Thursday the Sarah Connor Chronicles begin on Virgin.