Last Man Standing

For the last two weekends I've almost given up my usual Friday social whirl.  Why, you ask?  Simply because I've been seduced and beguiled by the BBC's adaptation of Ford Maddox Ford's novel Parade's End.  It's brilliant television, with an excellent cast and a hugely impressive script by Tom Stoppard, all the more impressive given the complexity of the novel (actually its four novels in one).  If I describe the production as Downtown Abbey for grownups that might give you a little flavour.  It's Downton Abbey in that it covers much the same period, but Parade's End is as clever and commendable as the former is risible and second rate. 

Actually my engagements were too pressing to forgo, so thank the gods for iPlayer, knowing that it was there waiting for me to savour at my own leisure.  And how I savoured the delicious Benedict Cumberbatch as an eatable Christopher Tietjens, the book's saint-like and suffering hero.  I would have watched it simply for his beautiful English, for those wholly delicious vowel sounds, unpolluted by dirty estuary waters.  But along with that comes a performance just as immaculate as his speech.  

That would be well enough, but the second barrel of the gun is Rebecca Hall playing his wife Sylvia, just as excellent in every way, cool, detached and calculating.  While the other characters are not quite in the same league as these two, they are only a shade or two short of superb, especially Roger Allam as General Campion and Adelaide Clemens as Valentine Wannop, Tietjens’ lover who is not a lover, because circumstances have a fortunate tendency to postpone consummation!

I actually started Some Do Not... (yes, the three dots are in the title), the first of the quartet, a couple of years ago but then was sidetracked by other things.  I took it down from the shelf to see my place marker still there, some sixty pages in.  I so regret not persevering at the time, which would surely have added to my enjoyment of the television drama.  I intend to make good soon, just as I intend to order the series when it comes out on DVD.

Christopher Tietjens, as I say, is a kind of saint; Sylvia Tietjens a kind of devil.  He is Saint Anthony; she is the demon sent to taunt him.  With the action opening shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, we are introduced to Tietjens as England's last gentleman, a Tory, as he describes himself, of an exact type.  With his standards of decency and impeccable code of honour he is out of place in his time.  He would have been even more out of place in our time, set against a moral and political caricature like David Cameron, a Tory of a wholly inexact type.  

Sorry; I'm getting away from the point.  Tietjens is out of time.  His time, be believes, was the seventeenth century, "the only satisfactory age in England."  Actually he would have been just as out of place then as in his Edwardian twilight.  A victim of social malice, he would have been an even greater victim in the morally debased court of Charles II, a place where it was as well to take religious conviction and personal probity so far and no further.  I just imagine the saintly Christopher set against a notorious rake like John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, whom Sylvia would surely have taken as a lover!

And she does take a lover, less for the pleasure it gives her (she actually treats the benighted man as a bit of a joke) and more for the pain it gives her husband.  If he belongs to the past she is very much is a girl of the present, or even the future, anticipating the racier standards of conduct that were to follow the War.  Despite her adultery (he is not even sure if his son is his) Tietjens refuses to divorce her because, well, gentlemen don't do that.  She can, if she wishes, but she won't because she is a Catholic, a very flexible Catholic, I should add, mindful of the interdicts against divorce, ignoring those against adultery.  But they complement each other beautifully, just as Cumberbatch complements Hall.  

He is a masochist; she is a sadist. The more he suffers, the more she tortures, almost ruining his reputation and standing in society in the pursuit of her whims.  The paradox is that he is the only man whom she admires, the only grown up, such a contrast with her lover, the ridiculous and melodramatic Potty Perowne, well played by Tom Mison in the Beeb adaptation.  There was a really amusing scene in the most recent episode set in Rouen during the War, Christopher now being at the front.  Potty is in the same hotel.  Sylvia has denied him sex, her room locked against his urgent pleadings.  She tells him that it will be unlocked on this particular night, though he may not like what she has to offer.  He doesn’t - box in the ears from Christopher, who also happens to be there!  

This episode, the penultimate, concluded with a terrific scene between Tietjens and General Campion, a man who has acted as his frustrated protector against all the forces that would pull him down.  Now he has no choice but to send him to almost certain death at the front.  "What is a man to do when a woman is unfaithful, sir?” asks Christopher "Divorce the harlot", the general replies, "Or live with her like a man.  What sort of fellow wouldn't see that?”  Christopher falls back on his antique standards "There used to be, among families, a position...a certain...call it parade", he manages to say.  "Was there?", returns the general, "Well there are no more parades for that regiment.  It held out to the last man but you were him."

I shall be sorry to see this parade end.  I expect it will be some time before I almost stay in on Friday night again.

In Blood Stepped in so Far

I love Shakespeare for his words, his poetry and his great theatrical dramas, high and low, tragic and comic.  He may have been a poor player but he did not strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then was heard no more.  He has been heard down the ages; he will be heard through time, for as long as English is spoken and the theatre exists.  That’s the other reason why I love Shakespeare – his abiding relevance. 

His plays can be read on so many levels, read in such a way that they bring out novel and dynamic interpretations.  Last year, in his directorial debut, Ralph Fiennes created a striking Coriolanus.  The setting is Rome and not Rome; the setting is a war-torn world which could easily be Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Chechnya or even Serbia, where it was shot on location. 

Incidentally, to go off at a slight tangent, that same play once caused a riot in Paris!  It was even banned for a time.  Yes, that’s right.  In February 1934 the government of Eduard Daladier, reacting to an anti-parliamentary interpretation that had been placed on a new production of the play by the right-wing pressure group, Action Française, banned further performances. In the growing heat engendered by the Stavisky Affair, a scandal that exposed extensive political and financial corruption, members of the group had appeared in the theatre in force, cheering on the play's denunciations of political leaders.

In Action Française, the movement's newspaper, praise of Coriolanus was used as an excuse to attack French democracy; to hurl accusations of corruption and villainy against the republic and its institutions in the light of every fresh revelation about Alexandre Stavisky, a Jewish financier and embezzler. Circulation shot up as Action Française urged people to come and protest in large numbers at the Chamber of Deputies, the first time in history, so far as I am aware, that Shakespeare contributed towards a major political riot - and a French one at that!

Anyway, let me get back to my theme, which is the abiding topicality of Shakespeare’s work.  I watched a performance of Macbeth last week on BBC iPlayer, and what a performance it was, the Scottish Play as I’ve never seen it before.  Directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart (think Star Trek!) in the title role, it brought out so many nuances.  The play’s central themes of ambition, treachery and guilt are all there, but there was something more – a brilliant dissertation on the nature of tyranny and the moral corruption it engenders.

The setting, and the costumes, as well as some old news footage of goose-stepping soldiers, make it clear that Stalinist Russia has become Stalinist Scotland!  Macbeth has been transformed from the courageous soldier, whose reputation travels ahead of him, to a bloody dictator.  The growing body count seems to merge into one great purge.  People live in fear and fear engenders suspicion. 

The whole atmosphere is suffused with menace, as the terror takes deeper hold.  Even Shakespeare’s own words take on added meaning.  I’m thinking here of the lines in Act Four, Scene Two, where the earl of Ross speaks to Lady Macduff, whose husband has not long fled the country;

I dare not speak much further;

But cruel are the times when we are traitors

And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea

Each way and none.

Cruel indeed are the times when we are traitors and do not know ourselves.  Macbeth’s hired assassins come like an NKVD death squad.  Lady Macduff and all her children are butchered.  Earlier we see Banquo being murdered by means of a lethal injection and Ross being interrogated in what could easily be a cell in the Lubyanka. 

The lead performances were excellent, Kate Fleetwood’s depiction of Lady Macbeth as good as that of Patrick Stewart as the king, dammed by delusion and equivocation.  Even the lesser roles I’ve never seen performed more brilliantly.  How wonderfully sinister the three witches were, the three weird sisters who appeared as just that – sisters, hospital sisters to be exact.  My goodness, these are no angels of mercy!  

The setting itself is kind of hospital come hell’s kitchen come hotel come lunatic asylum which serves as Macbeth’s castle.  The atmosphere is intensely claustrophobic.  As the play enters into the dénouement we are no longer in Stalin’s Russia but in Hitler’s bunker.  Yes, the references to Downfall are obvious!  There were other movie references I recognised.  At the very end, an end after the end, in a nice little touch by Goold that I feel sure Shakespeare himself would have admired, we see the Macbeths, holding up their bloody hands in an old-fashioned caged elevator.  It's on its way down.  This is Angel Heart; this is the descent into hell. 

It will be on iPlayer until 4 July if you are able to get it.  Incidentally, in the programme notes it says that the play is set in an “undefined and threatening central European world.”  I assumed this meant that all of Shakespeare’s geographical references had been removed, but no, Scotland still stands where it did…even if it is part of an undefined and threatening central European world! 

A Question of Equivocation

I don’t watch a lot of television.  In fact I hardly watch it at all; I don’t even have a television set in my rooms at college.  When I’m in London or elsewhere there is just far too much to do, places to go, people to see, books to read, premiers to attend, parties and more parties!  Besides most of what’s broadcast is complete rubbish, a form of death by entertainment, the kind of mind-numbing real live life shows anticipated with stunning prescience in The Year of the Sex Olympics, a play I wrote about here a couple of years ago (The Live Life Show, 9 June, 2010.)

I do, however, use catch up services like BBC iPlayer, just to make sure I’ve not missed anything worthwhile.  My viewing tends to be a bit sporadic, though, depending very much on what else is happening in my life.  I had some time to spare at the weekend and decided to see what was on offer.  I’m so glad I did because each broadcast has a limited shelf-life. 

There was an excellent documentary by Professor Mary Beard on life in ancient Rome.  It’s not that I want to talk about, though.  Rather it’s The King and the Playwright: a Jacobean History, presented by Professor James Shapiro.  Hitherto I’d never heard of Schapiro, an American specialist in Shakespeare based at Columbia University. 

It was quite brilliant, an exploration of the way in which the transition from Tudor to Stuart rule impacted on Shakespeare’s drama.  In plays like Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens and King Lear Shapiro shows how the dramatist, now part of the King’s Men playing company, both flattered and subtly criticised James I, the new monarch. 

But it was in the second episode, touching on ‘equivocation’ that really opened my eyes.  In placing Macbeth, the Scottish play, in the context of English history, Professor Shapiro delivered a real wow-me effect.  He brought out contemporary nuances that I was completely unaware of, matters relating to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.  For an American professor of literature to alert me to a novel dimension of English history really is something! 

The key here is the word ‘equivocation’, which entered general usage during the early Jacobean period.  It acquired a particular resonance in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, when a nation was beset by uncertainty, by fear of terrorism and the even greater fear of potential terrorism. 

Even as the principle plotters were executed in January, 1606 the authorities continued to look for the mastermind behind a scheme that, if successful, would have killed not only the king but virtually the whole of the English establishment.  The man they alighted on was Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest, who had been charged with keeping the faith alive in England.  Now the Plot acquired a whole new dimension, implicating the Catholic community at large.

In the course of investigating Garnet’s alleged complicity a document was discovered, quite explosive, appropriately enough, on the question of equivocation – namely, the justifiable lie.  A Treatise of Equivocation was really just a guide for Catholics living in a hostile Protestant environment.  As Shapiro explains, it was a ‘how to guide’ for English Catholics, torn in their loyalties between the King and the Pope, on evading direct questions by subtle forms of dissimulation; lying, in other words, without lying.  The government had its mastermind. 

The trial of Garnet was a sensation.  He was accused of being involved in not just the Gunpowder Plot but other treasonable schemes going back some fifteen years.  Equivocation was used as a fundamental part of the prosecution’s case.  In parrying the accusations Garnet said that even Jesus himself had equivocated, which doubtless deepened the offence.  The jury took a mere fifteen minutes to reach a verdict.  As a contemporary said, Garnet would equivocate even so far as the gallows, but he will hang, without equivocation.

Shakespeare, in his brilliance, caught both the word and the national mood in his new play – Macbeth.  Those who know the play will immediately call to mind the supposedly comic devil porter scene.  It’s night.  To the gates of Macbeth’s castle comes an unknown visitor, who proceeds to knock loudly at the door. The porter arises and enters into a mood of devilish reverie, as if at the gates of hell;

Here's a knocking indeed! If a
man were porter of hell-gate, he should have
old turning the key.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of
Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged 

himself on the expectation of plenty: come in
time; have napkins enow about you; here
you'll sweat for't. 

Knocking within
Knock,
knock! Who's there, in the other devil's
name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could 

swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an
English tailor come hither, for stealing out of
a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
roast your goose. 

Knocking within
Knock,
knock; never at quiet! What are you? But
this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter
it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire. 

The whole play, which centres on a regicide, had a tremendous topical relevance.  The porter is alert to treason and equivocation.  James himself would have recognised who the principle equivocator was, the traitor who could not equivocate his way to heaven. 

Macbeth is full of equivocation, of evasions in the face of the truth.  Macbeth equivocates, Lady Macbeth equivocates, dissimulation in multiple forms, high and low.  In the end Macbeth realises that he himself has been the victim of the witches’ equivocation;

I pull in resolution and begin

To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend

That lies like truth.

How carefully Shakespeare walked here.  To deal with such sensitive issues with such directness carried potential dangers.  A play centring on regicide might have been fatal in less skilful hands.  But Shakespeare balances equivocation with flattery, holding up a mirror to the king when the play touches on the issue of the succession.  Now the witches stop equivocating.  Macbeth sees into the future; he sees James himself; his treachery has been fruitless; the rightful line will prevail.  There is no more equivocation. 

Carry on Upstairs Downstairs

Last September ITV, the commercial television company in England, began airing Downton Abbey, a new costume drama set in Edwardian England. It was successful enough to warrant a second series, which will be aired later this year.

I so wanted to see it, not just because I love historical dramas but also because the script was written by Julian Fellowes, the English actor, novelist and screen-writer responsible for Gosford Park, a wonderful movie that, amongst other things, explores class relations in the England of the 1930s in a splendidly comic light. Unfortunately I don’t have a telly in my rooms at college, so I missed the debut series. To make good I was given the DVD as a Christmas present.

Now, at last, I’ve seen it…and I rather wish I had not! What a disappointment it is, how ridiculous the script, how absurdly modern the view of Edwardian people and times. I could have excused it if it had the same comic overtones as Gosford Park, but it does not. Oh, sorry, that’s not quite true, because it worked for me on a level of pastiche, so much so that, at first reflection, I thought Fellowes might have written in an intentionally sardonic mood, laughing at those who take this kind of tosh seriously. Oh, yes, it’s tosh alright, a sort of Carry on Upstairs Downstairs

I’m not sure where to begin, so the butler might be the best place. Charles Carson (Jim Carter), the said butler, has a shady past: well, not really - he was once part of a music-hall double act, the Cheerful Charlies; that’s all. Butlers, of course, are the ultimate word in being a gentleman’s gentleman; so when Charles Griggs (Nicky Henson), the other Charlie, turns up he decides to be a right Charlie by attempting a spot of extortion, just to show that Charlie the Butler is no better than he ought to be. He finally enters the grand house, admitted by the front door (really?), wearing a crown derby hat, the sure sign of a cad (it helps to be able to read the signs!) Enter Robert Crawley, earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), and lord of this absurd manor, who promptly pays off this Dick Dastardly! Why not just tell him to fuck off? I would not have been surprised if he had; it would have been quite in keeping with the tone being set!

Lord Grantham has daughters, three of them - Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown-Finlay). Unfortunately his male heir died in the sinking of the Titanic, an event with which Downton is ushered in, and as the girls can’t inherit the estate in their own right the best thing is to marry the eldest off to some wealthy husband. The duke of Crowborough (Charlie Cox) is a possibility, so he is invited to trot along as a house guest. The problem is he is a bit of an Oscar Wilde in sexual preference, not only that but he immediately tries to seduce Thomas (William Mason), a footman. So, it’s bye, bye your gay grace!

Next one Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) is found, a distant cousin who turns out to be a frightful middle-class prig, with his even more frightful do-gooding mother (Penelope Wilton), who clashes dreadfully with the old dowager countess (Maggie Smith). Not really the county set, don't ye know.

Poor Lady Mary, faced with the prospect of being married to this tiresome and earnest bore, has a bit of a fling when Kemal Pamuk (Theo James), a lusty Turkish diplomat, turns up in the house, and almost as promptly turns up in her bedroom. There, in the course of the night, the tupping Turk, obviously exhausted by his sexual exertions, shuffles off his mortal coil. Oh, I forgot to mention that he was helped to find the bedroom by a gay servant, one the duke obviously missed, who made the mistake of trying his chances.

Oh, what to do, what to do? Think of the scandal – a naked Turk, a naked dead Turk in her ladyship’s bed! Mummy (Elizabeth McGovern), an unflappable old brick, immediately comes to the rescue, and with the aid of Daisy (Sophie McShera), the scullery maid (the scullery maid!!), carries the said dead naked Turk back to his own bed. All are sworn to secrecy but, alas, Daisy later confides in Lady Edith, the jealous younger sister (what, no Turk?), who promptly writes to the Turkish ambassador, revealing all the facts, the sort of thing that Edwardian sisters did. Don’t worry; Mary gets her own back, putting the kibosh on Edith’s marriage prospects!

I could go on like this, go on about this risible commune, where the upstairs people are equally at home in downstairs worlds, but I’m getting bored with the whole silly farrago. Hugh Bonneville, whose performance is unbelievably wooden, was interviewed recently, saying that people enjoy the series because it reminds them of the simple values of ‘dignity’ and ‘mutual respect’ that used to exist in this country. Oh, not I, Hugh, you dear old thing; it reminds me of something else altogether, like slapstick and farce! No matter; seemingly American folk are also lapping it up, this tale of Never Never Land. :-)

The Tragedy of John Amery

My attention recently to An English Tragedy, a play by Ronald Harwood which depicts the final weeks in the life of John Amery, executed for treason in December 1945. It was broadcast on Radio Four a week last Saturday. Unfortunately I missed it and by the time I found out it was no longer available on iPlayer.

But, from a position of knowing virtually nothing at all about the subject, I’ve done a spot of quick background reading. It’s a tragic story; tragic for him and tragic for his family. It’s a story of self-destruction, the deliberate self-destruction of a man who in some ways recalls the fictional character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He even had the same life-long attachment to his teddy bear.

John came from a very privileged background. He was the son of Leo Amery and brother of Julian Amery, both members of the Conservative Party who rose to high office. Leo was to serve as Secretary of State for India in Churchill’s wartime cabinet. But John, for some not fully explained reason, was a life-long bad 'un; a man extended every opportunity who invariably wasted every opportunity. There is something odd about him, something I can't quite pinpoint. It's a mixture of things; he was at war with his world; he was at war with his parents; he was at war with himself.

John was a worry to his parents from a very early age. Nanny used to tell them of the terrible tantrums that he had, and that he was a very hard child to manage. One of his first teachers described him as "extremely abnormal" with a tendency to live inside himself. His behaviour at Harrow was such that his worried parents referred him to a psychiatrist, who concluded that he had no moral sense of right and wrong. From Harrow he was sent to a boys' school in Switzerland only to return after contracting syphilis, which he claimed to have caught while working as a rent boy.

And so it went on, this litany of troubles and endless rebellion. At the age of twenty he married Una Eveline Wing, an actress who turned out to be a prostitute. He married despite the wishes of his parents, leaving with Una for Paris after they refused their permission. Still his parents indulged him, bailing him out from disastrous business endeavours and criminal exploits. Always short of money, Una was to claim that he continued to work as a homosexual prostitute.

Apart from the general dissolute air he cried with him, he was something of a fantasist. Hating communism, he claimed to have fought with the Spanish Nationalists after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, being awarded a medal of honour while serving with Italian volunteer units sent to Franco by Mussolini. In fact this was a lie, though still in wide circulation. Even Harwood believes it to be true. Far from fighting in the war, Amery did not enter Spain until 1939 after the conflict was over.

On his return to France he took up with Jeanine Barde, yet another prostitute. He also fell under the influence of Jacques Doirot, leader of the fascist Parti Populaire Francais. It was now that he adopted a lavish form of anti-Semitism, yet another way of objectifying his hatred of the world. The Wikipedia article describes him as a 'fascist' though I can find no evidence that he ever belonged to any fascist party. Fascism was just another attitude for him, a style and a fashion. There is something more, something about his anti-Semitism, though let me hold on that for a bit.

After the Germans conquered France in 1940, he came to the attention of the occupation authorities, having written some articles critical of British bombing, receiving a personal invitation to come to Berlin from. There, as a guest of the Germany government, he made propaganda broadcasts to Britain beginning in November 1942, on the same network as William Joyce, the so-called Lord Haw Haw. In England Leo Amery was assured by both Churchill and the King that this was no refection on him or his loyalty. Still, he took the final step of going to a lawyer and finally disinheriting his wayward son.

John made nine broadcasts in all, though clearly he soon exhausted his usefulness, as the Germans sent him back to France at the end of the year. There he married for a second time, to Michelle Thomas, his third prostitute lover. This seems to have been the one consistent act in his life, this taste for a particular type of sexual professional!

Back in France he was impressed by the volunteer force that Doriot and others had raised to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. This gave him the idea that a similar British unit might be recruited from among British prisoners of war. He was allowed to trawl POW camps in France for the purpose of recruiting. Despite the harsh conditions in these places, and the semi-starvation rations, his mission was almost a complete failure. In the end something like fifty men signed up for the so-called Legion of Saint George.

Amery's connection with this unit was ended in October 1943, when it was taken over by the Waffen SS and renamed the British Free Corps. Far from being a 'corps', this force, of purely propaganda value, had less than thirty men at any one time, weaker than a German platoon. Amery returned to Berlin, where he continued to write and broadcast propaganda before travelling to Italy in late 1944 to aid the Salo Republic, Mussolini's rump fascist state in the north of the country. He was captured by Italian partisans, eventually being handed over to the British.

Back in Britain, and with the war now at an end, he was charged with treason. Despite being previously disowned by the family, both Leo and Julian did their best to come to has assistance.

Unlike that of William Joyce, the case against Amery was cast-iron; he was an obvious traitor. Still, he had some powerful connections among the old establishment. There were strong grounds, moreover, for showing that he suffered from a form of mental illness, a defence that had saved the American poet Ezra Pound from similar accusations. But John, in his final act of rebellion, pleaded guilty on 28 November 1945 despite being warned by the judge of the consequences of such a declaration. It was, in effect, an act of suicide, a final way of wounding his family. He was duly hanged at Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepont on December 19, aged thirty-three years old.

In his radio broadcasts from Germany Amery said that he was preventing a "world dominated by Jewry." The tragic thing is, the thing I alluded to above, is that he was quarter Jewish himself, though the family had kept this secret well hidden, something that Harwood discovered in the course of his research for An English Tragedy. Leo Amery's mother had been born in the Jewish quarter of Budapest, though he chose to keep this inconvenient fact hidden because he thought it might impede his rise through the ranks of the Conservative Party, given the casual anti-Semitism of the day. The irony is that while John was broadcasting on the dangers of world Jewry from Berlin he himself would have been eligible for deportation and extermination by the lights of the Wansee Conference.

Was this knowledge part of his self-loathing, part of his lifelong war with his family? It's possible-and Harwood speculates that it was an important factor - but we will never know for certain; indeed, it is uncertain that he new himself. Was his guilty plea an act of expiation or a final act of spite? Again that is something that we will never know.

I have to say there is for me something oddly compelling about John Amery, something compelling in the tragedy of his life, a life that never found an anchor in anything at all other than the worst of causes. He carries shades of Arthur Rimbaud, another professional bad boy. But Rimbaud had true talent. All Amery's potential was squandered into nothing.

Resistance is Futile

We all have our favourite childhood villains. Mine just happened to be the Borg, the cybernetic race from Star Trek, a race that expands and assimilates others in the pursuit of perfection; a race where no individuals exist just a collective or a hive mind. They both fascinated and terrified me; fascinated because their determination was so compelling, and terrified because I did not want to be ‘assimilated’, I did not want to lose my individuality.

In ever way they were different from the other alien encounters faced by the Star Trek crews. Races like the Klingons were frightening enough but familiar; after all, they were no more than Vikings in space. But the Borg, what possible basis of comparison existed for them, those half-humans, and half-machines? Even their ships, their cubes, were different from all others. I so admire the ingenuity and the imagination that saw the Borg emerge from virtually nothing, only to assume a definite shape and rationale subsequent to their first appearance in the television series.

My favourite Borg, of course, was Seven of Nine, played by Jerry Ryan in Star Trek Voyager, a Borg who managed to de-Borg, if I can put it like that, recovering something of her humanity among Captain Janeway and her crew. But what I liked about her particularly, what I identified with, was her cold, sharp intellect, her rational mind that never seemed to lose her old Borg associations completely. So, perhaps assimilation is not so bad after all.

Ana is the Borg. You will be assimilated. :-)

I want to sleep with Muhannad

I see the Turks are making some smash TV shows, a smash in the Arab world anyway. There is a show called Valley of the Wolves in which Israelis are shown doing nasty things to Palestinians, but that’s not the most popular, not by a long-way. You see Arabs don’t always go for high politics; they also like a spot of romance; they like a soap-opera called Noor.

This show, dubbed in Arabic, was first broadcast last year by MBC, a Saudi-owned satellite network viewed across the Arab world. The message is interesting, not one the Arabs are generally used to, cantering around the adventures of an emancipated modern woman. But for women throughout the Middle-East and North Africa that is not the main issue, no, the main issue is a blue-eyed blond former male model who goes by the name of Muhannad. The other issue is a portrait of a marriage; for you see Muhannad is a ‘modern man’, one who even does the dishes!

The bliss of this ideal throws the reality into a distressing contrast. Noor, it is said, is responsible for a rising number of divorces in the Arab world, as women compare Muhannad with their own husbands. In Jordan one woman was divorced after her husband found his picture on her mobile. It gets worse. In Syria another divorce was occasioned after a wife announced to her husband that “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.” :-))

Not surprisingly this trend has caught the attention of the Saudi religious establishment. The Grand Mufti has called for a boycott of the Turkish series, describing it as ‘evil.’ But MBC knows a good thing. Not only does Noor continue but it has obtained the broadcasting rights to other Turkish television dramas. This is how revolutions are made, by popular culture rather than grand politics. It was West German TV that brought down the Berlin Wall as much as anything else. Perhaps the Turks will bring their Muslim cousins right into the modern age, the age of Noor and dishy Muhannad.

Loving Emma

Emma is my favourite Jane Austen novel by far. I love everything about it, I love the language, I love the humour, the wit, the characters; I love Emma herself for all of her conceit and all of her fallibilities. I think I understand Emma, for I almost fell into the same trap myself once, believing that one understands other people and their emotions, believing that they can somehow be managed to a desired set of ends.

I enjoyed the movie version with Gwyneth Paltrow, who was quite convincing in the lead. So I was really looking forward to the new BBC four-apart adaptation by Sandy Welch, which finished last Sunday evening. Yes, it was a free adaptation and, yes, some of the nuances of Austen’s book have been lost and the characters ‘liberalised’ in point of deportment and expression but I really loved it, loved the whole thing, not in the least put off by the curmudgeonly review in The Daily Telegraph. The soufflé rose and rose!

The cast were super. I particularly liked Michael Gambon as the fussy and hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse, and Jonny Lee Miller was a lovely and sexy-and scolding!-Mr Knightly, but Romola Gari was Emma, she was Emma as I see her; impish, mischievous, expressive, thoughtful, self-assured and scheming. In her face, her eyes alone she conveyed so much liveliness; she deserves recognition for that if nothing besides. I suppose the purist will be horrified, perhaps preferring a ‘stiffer’, less modern version, but not I. Great books and great characters always adjust to the times. I feel sure Jane would have loved this Emma for a modern age.

The production values, the period settings and the costumes were all wonderful; the whole thing was simply splendid. There will be such a gap in my Sunday evenings now. What shall I do? Yes, I know; I’ll read Emma yet again. On second thoughts, I might just go look for a Harriet Smith. :-))