Space Babies is Ruby’s first Tardis adventure. After the first earthbound entanglement always comes the voyage. We need to tread in the footsteps of wide-eyed wonderment without feeling we’re repeating ourselves too much. It’s hard not to be reminded of Rose’s introduction to space travel in “The End of the World” (2005), also written by Russell T. Davies.
Before she gets this trip, however, there’s a little time travel demonstration and a reasonably funny joke about the Butterfly Effect.
The Doctor has to say something about himself, and we are reminded that the Timeless Child revelation remains current and will not go away unless something happens to refute it. We are also reminded that part of the Doctor’s need for a companion consists the vicarious buzz he gets off the wide eyed excitement of someone seeing something for the first time. Companions keep him fresh, and they heighten or rather freshen his aesthetic appreciation for the universe.
Snowflakes.
Snowflake is, of course, a phobic term of casual right wing abuse, but Russell T. Davies seems to want to remind us of snowflakes in terms of their uniqueness. The Doctor is the last of his kind, but we’re all sort the last of our kind because we’re all seemingly irreplaceable. Even a monster made of snot deserves to be spared by dint of its irreplaceability. I was reminded of the Third Doctor’s many arguments with the Brigadier and other UNIT functionaries regarding the sacredness of all life.
(We also get a strategically political swipe at inhumane policies involving asylum seekers as well as legal systems that force children to be born without protecting them after they are born.)
With The Devil’s Chord, we are sent to 1963. 1963 is of course an annus mirabilis, as Larkin recognised. Who would not want to go back there? Ruby certainly does. Showing up at the recording of Please Please Me is one of the more obvious applications of time travel.
Doctor Who and the Beatles have often danced around one another. In The Chase, the Tardis Team pause to enjoy “Ticket to Ride” on a monitor. “Paperback Writer” plays in a cafe at the beginning of Evil of the Daleks. The Three Doctors references “I am the Walrus” but we are denied the dubious pleasure of hearing Patrick Troughton try to play it on the recorder.
The Devil’s Chord is not really about the Beatles. A proper Yesterday Beatles dominated Doctor Who episode might involve someone giving teenage Macca’s bicycle a puncture to prevent him ever getting to St Peter’s Church fete in 1957. In this dystopian tale, John and Paul have no mojo but neither does anyone else thanks to a sort of music vampire called The Maestro. This season is destined to feature megabeings from beyond the knowable universe for whom the laws of physics do not apply. The year 1925 appears to have been something of a portal. A world without the Beatles is also a world without any concept of music – a world headed for an early nuclear winter. (The Doctor does what the he did decades ago with Sarah Jane Smith in Pyramids of Mars – leaping forward to a barren landscape of a “present” that is the only available future unless evil is confronted in the “past”.)
The Maestro is played by Jinkx Monsoon with instant aplomb. The Maestro sucks all the rhythm and melody out of life and dreams of consuming the very music of the spheres. This being loves everything about music apart from the fact that it is supposed to be shared. They are what you’d get if you spliced together Mae West and Pennywise the clown.
Oddly enough, the Beatles really do save the universe. Or rather John and Paul do – this fast moving episode does not feel it can waste time or dialogue on George and Ringo. The Maestro declares that only a true genius could discover the chord capable of expelling them. Suddenly the piano winds up in front of first John and then John and Paul and they play something that gets the job done.
It’s not the chord from “A Day in the Life”. It reminds you of this chord only insofar as any dramatic piano chord played jointly by John and Paul is going to remind you of it. I had thought maybe the opening chord of “Hard Day’s Night” might be involved – but no – that one’s not arriving either.
One thing that creaky old 1960s shoestring budget Doctor Who could afford to do was sometimes use the music of the Beatles. Even with Disney money, 21st century who can no longer afford to do that. The episode ends with a song and dance number called “There’s always a Twist at the End!”
It got me thinking. Could they not have performed “Twist and Shout” at the end instead? It’s not a Lennon-McCartney original. It might be affordable and it would have been far more 1963. They could have done a great version of “Twist and Shout” and then had Ncuti Gatwa’s impish face declare at the end of the episode – “There’s always a twist at the end!” Isn’t that better? I mean – isn’t it?
I’m liking the way that 15 ain’t afraid to show fear. He doesn’t mind running away if the occasion demands it. In this respect, he’s a mixture of 2 and 3. He has the wacky dress sense of 3 but he has the open acknowledgement of terror that 2 was so good at.
I’m liking things. I’m going to tag along.
Here’a remarkable example of data visualisation. It’s hard to absorb. And it’s intended to be. Nuff respect to Professor Susan Wardell of the University of Otago in New Zealand for creating it.
I’ve been at the Irish Federation of University Teachers annual delegate Conference. (IFUT-ADC). Our guest speaker has been Sinead McGilloway from the Centre for Mental Health and Community Research.
We were presented with some terrifying statistics. It has been calculated that globally 12 billion working hours are lost annually as a result of mental health concerns at a cost of some 2-5 trillion dollars annually.
Within the Higher Education sector surveys in the UK demonstrate that between a third and a half of all those employees in the sector report significant anxiety on something like a constant basis. The growth of precarity in the sector means that many teaching staff are constantly concerned about where their next contract is coming from, are unable apply for a mortgage or start a family. Things will not be better in Ireland.
Of course there is a sense that, in the words of Liz Morrish, any lecturer working in Higher Education is “inherently vulnerable, overworked, and self-critical”. But academics run the same risks that anyone who is supposed to ‘love’ their jobs faces. Loving your job makes you care more about doing it properly and when you’re not empowered to do so your mental health suffers
“No decision about me – without me” is a well worn maxim, but it is critical to the restoration of morale within the sector. Mental health anxieties are sustained as a result of feeling powerless and undervalued. Autocratic university governance leads to mental health challenges throughout the higher education sector.
Typically University management wants to be seen to be mindful of mental health concerns. But they tend to do so by individuating the issue – by offering workshops and seminars – in other words making even more claims on people’s time. They are less keen on structural and cultural reforms that would make universities happier and saner places.
There’s only one way to achieve work life balance. It’s called collective bargaining.
And so the original 1970 version of the Let it Be film has been restored and can be watched on Disney Plus.
I hadn’t seen the Michael Lindsay Hogg film in forty years. Of course I watched the epic and supposedly corrective Get Back series a few years ago.
The conventional logic was that Let it Be was a gloomy film that explained why they broke up whereas the Peter Jackson Get Back series demonstrated how much love and joy persisted. But seeing Let it Be again, I’m not so sure.
I’m struck by how little context is offered by the 1970 cut. The film opens with Mal Evans carrying stuff. It closes with Mal Evans trying to placate the cops. But nobody watching the film on its original release would come out knowing who Mal Evans was. Nobody would know who Billy Preston was either, or why he was there. They would know nothing about Billy Preston except that he seemed unbelievably happy to be there. There is no explanation of the changing plans in this film and the band appear on the roof without any sort of preparation.
And the many of the joyful bits of Get Back were there in Let it Be. Heather is a delight. The extraordinary intimacy of “Two of Us” is preserved. Yes I know I know I know the song was written about Paul and Linda but in performance it is so very John and Paul. Lindsay Hogg (reputed son of Orson Welles) sneaks in a tiny shot of Yoko looking not best pleased by this duet. Get Back of course shows us George leaving the band. He walked out for many reasons, some of which were to do with John rather than Paul, but I can’t help but think that it wasn’t an accident that the walk out took place during a rehearsal of “Two of Us”. From a Third Beatle point of view it’s a very exclusionary song.
We do get Paul complaining to John about George saying “no” to everything but John is only half in the room, having trouble feigning interest in Paul’s insistence that the Beatles return to being a live band.
John and George subsequently complained that the film treated Paul as the leader. But how could any cut of this footage not show that? This is above all the story of Paul’s struggle to salvage something beautiful out of a difficult situation. John looks happy enough on the roof but the triumph is above all Paul’s because he wants this moment more. It’s not the north African amphitheatre. It’s not the Roundhouse. It’s the roof of the building. But it’s something – something unexpected that vindicates his necessary cajoling.
The street scenes are a revelation of course. We’re familiar with these contributors. The old geezer who just think’s they’re great. The pompous plutocrat who asserts that this is neither the time nor the place. The cheerful vicar. It is striking how conservatively most people, even young people, dressed in 1969. This is my lifetime. Only just – but it is. This is the strange alien London I was born into.
I could have been being pushed around in a pram around the Savile Row area. I could have been a barely ambulant infant staring upwards. Maybe Ma had an excuse to be in central London that day?
But she didn’t and I wasn’t. Heaven knows I’ve looked.
Coleridge accused William Godwin of ‘want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked’. It’s a bold and disquieting image, but Coleridge had a point. At times, reading Wollstonecraft’s private correspondence to Imlay you feel like someone rummaging through a sock drawer and discovering communications that were never meant for the light of day. Godwin wasn’t being salacious when he published these letters any more than he was when he published his astonishingly frank memoir of his wife. Rather, he was the product of a Utopian moment that treated liberation and transparency as almost synonymous terms. He was a firm believer in “the more you know”. “The truth will set you free.”
Godwin was concerned about the monstrous calumnies that surrounded the fascinating life and horrifying death of his late partner but he didn’t defend Mary Wollstonecraft’s memory the way a normal person would have done – or would do even today. He didn’t acc-ent-yu-ate teh the positive or el-im-i-nate the negative. Rather he published everything he could. Let everything Mary Wollstonecraft ever articulated be exposed to the public gaze.
Like many Utopian radicals, Godwin was not very good at imagining how the levers of power are to be seized (and then dismantled). For reason to triumph it only needs to be visible – indeed to be visible is to be irresistible.
These letters are painful to read because of their vulnerability. Nobody should ever express such dependence on another human being and certainly not the prominent feminist in Northern Europe. Towards the end she actually tells Imlay that she’s going to commit suicide. She even tells him how she’s going to do it. She even tells him which river she’s going to throw herself into. She does not tell him which bridge but in the 1790s there weren’t that many to choose from.
The next letter to him is after her ignominious rescue from the vicinity of Putney Bridge. Finally she is moving towards a final separation. A final final final (James Brown being dragged offstage) goodbye. And soon, good riddance.
You can’t not read these letters if you study Mary Wollstonecraft – or indeed if you teach her. They have been in the public domain for two hundred years. As someone teaching a class on Wollstonecraft you can try to make sure that everyone has read the published Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark first. In this intended and crafted work, perhaps her masterpiece, the sense of romantic melancholy is preserved and is potent but it doesn’t define or overpower the narrator.
But it’s not a case of self censorship. It’s not the case that the published work is bowdlerisation of some more authentic self. The published self is a desired self. The published self is a work of self-fashioning, an effort of craft and control and therefore something that is as revealing and as moving as anything Godwin found in that sock drawer.
As I watched the final results certified in the UK local elections, I found myself admiring the tactical nous of the Tories’ “expectation management” department. They spread the message ahead of time that it would be a “disaster” were their party to lose 500 or more councillors. In fact they will have only lost 475. Disaster averted. A mere 95% of a disaster is a triumph, right?
Earlier today, I became aware of reports that with a low turn out, Susan Hall might pull off a surprise win in the London Mayoral elections. The effect on me was an instant sense of heartache, a palpable pain. The ache grew. I started wonder how I’d respond to the idea that “London has Fallen”.
Of course, some might say that I have absolutely no business being so invested in foreign elections in any case. But London will always be different. I will always care what happens to London. The idea that an anti-environmentalist Trump supporter could be Mayor of London caused me considerable unease.
As it happens, Khan was victorious and decisively so. For a third term mayor to increase his share of the vote is no mean achievement.
Beyond my own emotional attachment to London, meanwhile, is the reality that the Trump model of politics is triumphing everywhere. Indeed, a singular feature of nativist rhetoric anywhere in the world is its bland cosmopolitanism. The same slogans are recycled from Argentina to Florida to the UK to Hungary. Those who claim to speak on behalf of their own cherished tribe are slavish followers of a global playbook that is drained of colour and particularity. Those who rail against globalism use the same tired phrases the whole wide world over.
And nobody should be voting for someone who hasn’t apologised for supporting Donald Trump. Supporting Donald Trump is a wicked thing to do. Good people do bad things. Good people apologise. Supporting a disgusting and delusional race-bating serial sex offender who has demonstrably attempted to overturn the democratic basis of the constitution he swore to protect is just plain wrong. There are no mere policy issues that can be weighed in the scale opposite Trump’s treachery. Treason against democracy is not a particular shortcoming that can be offset by various other factors. One side of the scale should be nailed down onto the kitchen cabinet.
We’re living in a shrinking world where all elections seem implicated with one another – whether we like it or not. Just as a second Trump presidency will vindicate and empower despotism the world over, even if I had no personal connection with London, I couldn’t feel indifferent to the politics of the nearest unambiguously world city to where I happen to live and I need someone who isn’t a fan of Donald Trump to be its mayor.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Etc.
Stephen Rea was in every Irish movie made between 1980 and 2000. Wasn’t he? And he’s also in this. Unfortunately.
There is a very great deal wrong with this Ulysses adaptation that I’ve recently managed to track down.
Stephen Rea’s Bloom is so soft-spoken as to be virtually inaudible. We see none of Bloom’s ebullience. We see none of Bloom’s conversational joy, his ability to join in virtually any conversation on any topic. This is a sad and defeated Bloom, one who hides in the corner and mumbles. He is no version of Odysseus whatsoever.
Hugh O’Connor is far too bright-eyed and bushy tailed to be Stephen Dedalus. At one point he puts his arm affectionately around Haines. My reading of Stephen Dedalus is of someone who never puts their arm around anyone – least of all Haines.
Patrick Bergin has a cameo as “The Citizen”. The Cyclops episode makes no reference to nationalism whatsoever and the citizen is just an antisemite without any larger political agenda. Sean Walsh had the chance to organise a narrative that accommodates urgent nationalist hopes and fears and turned down this critical opportunity.
For example, the British squaddies are entirely missing from the Circe episode, with the result that it’s not exactly clear how Stephen ends up horizontal at the end of the sequence.
This represents a massive missed opportunity. The 1967 Joseph Strick movie was set in present day (1960s) Dublin, which has interesting implications but which demands the erasure of much of the colonial context. You couldn’t have uniformed British squaddies roaming the streets of 1960s Dublin. Bloom (2003) on the other hand is set and costumed in 1904 Dublin. Why not bring back the British imperialism? Why not have Catholicism and Imperialism restored as rival polarities?
The two boys on the beach – Jacky and Tommy Caffrey – are far too old. Small thing – but it would have been an easy thing to get right.
Oddly enough, we are given some of Stephen’s theory of Hamlet in the National Library – an episode that is cut from both the Strick film and the Abbey Theatre dramatisation. We are also given a snatch of “Oxen of the Sun” which even attempts to replicate certain literary archaisms – but the brief scene makes no reference to Holles Street maternity hospital so the whole surrounding context of suffering, birth, and death is lost.
Worst of all is the music. The music offers no counterpoint or commentary on the dialogue – merely amplifying the most obvious emotional register. Whether on stage or on film, when music merely reinforces emotions already expressed verbally the effect is cloying and annoying. The director does not appear to trust the script to do its work, and/or the actors to interpret the script, and/or the audience to understand the script. The overall effect is infantilising in its pervasive distrust.
This is a film which has a very low opinion of me. Well, not me especially, but the audience in general. We are, according to director Sean Walsh, not to be trusted to think and feel for ourselves.
No it’s not Spock’s funeral at the end of Wrath of Khan.
The most expressive use of the hymn Amazing Grace ever film was in an episode of Cheers originally broadcast on the 25th May, 1984. The episode was called “Coach buries a Grudge”.
Spock’s funeral, lest we forget, involves Scottie playing the tune on the bagpipes. There is no reference to John Newton’s actual words.
Coach, on the other hand, has his own relationship with the words of the hymn. The Coach, you will remember, was the elderly bartender whose sense of consecutive logic has been eroded by too many baseballs to the head over too long a period. He is delightful. He is incapable of malice or bitterness. Almost.
In this episode, a big memorial celebration for the life of his old baseball comrade “T Bone” is planned for the bar. Sam remembers T Bone and dislikes him and unfortunately Coach overhears Sam explaining to Diane that Sam recalls T Bone hitting on Coach’s wife. Coach collapses in a new form of grief. He goes from grieving his friend to grieving the love he now feels was wasted on this man. It’s a different form of overlapping grief. He is torn up inside.
Coach is determined to expose T Bone at his own memorial. He starts by saying “T-Bone Scarpiggione was a son of…. a son of… ” choking up several times before continuing “T-Bone Scarpiggione was a son of an immigrant. And like most immigrants, he was a human being.” (This line got a laugh in 1984 – in the terrifying and disgusting year of 2024 in which fascists seem to be winning everywhere such a joke would not be risked.) It is then revealed that T Bone variously hurt and wounded everyone present. There is a sudden stampede to hang T Bone in effigy – to suspend his cardboard cutout from the highest yardarm in Boston harbour.
Diane leaps to the vacant podium and starts singing “Amazing Grace”. The would be lynch mob is checked and slowly reassemble in the bar to join in.
No final joke. Closing titles.
It takes a very funny show to survive this kind of sentimentality. This is sentimentality done right. The show has earned the right to jerk tears from us having (by 1984) delivered consistent and unsentimental laughs for two years.
The show declares, in the least dogmatic or sectarian terms possible, that vile, treacherous, libidinous T Bone is not beyond Divine grace. There is a higher love that can embrace and reclaim even T Bone. And within this knowledge of T Bone’s possible redemption there is a communality, a turning inward that is simultaneously a turning outward and the fact that it is impossible to separate one’s own need for forgiveness from the imperative to forgive others.
Coach cannot articulate such theology, but he knows the words to the hymn. The hymn flows through him. The words are not his but he’s an intuitively happy conduit.
(It is rather shocking to be reminded of the fact that these words were first set to the tune we all know by a southern baptist called Walker in the 1850s for the benefit of an all white congregation near Charleston SC. Yes – the first people to sing the hymn as we know it would have all been passionately pro slavery.)
Whenever Plough and the Stars is staged at the Abbey Theatre (which is often), audiences get the thrill of feeling that they are sitting pretty close to the imagined location of the events being staged.
Pull of the Stars at the Gate Theatre has outdone its rival in this critical respect, with The Gate nuzzling in the very shadow of the Rotunda Hospital.
By all means go and see it. It will exhaust you, but inspire you as well.
This is Emma Donoghue’s own adaptation of her own novel. Necessary sacrifices have been made. Gone is Julia Power’s house and her commute to work. Gone are the male doctors and orderlies. Gone (but frequently referred to) is the mute brother with PTSD. The opening scene is phantasmagoric – the ruined environs of O’ Connell street evoking an affinity with the trench warfare that we (but not the characters on stage) know is nearly over. This is, emphatically, a war zone – and a war zone that will not achieve any armistice as a result of a few general signing anything in a train carriage a few days after the events we are about to witness.
The performances are remarkable. Una Kavanagh offers a striking vision of someone in continual delirium. India Mullen gives evolving humanity to the snooty south Dublin character whose pain and whose loss confers a heightened sense of shared humanity. The one villain, “Sister Luke” is rendered very plausible by Ruth McCabe and I found myself resenting the audience’s momentary admiration for her admirable casuistry when replying that she didn’t know any “Mrs Lynn”
At the heart of the play are the lovers, Julia and Bridie. Julia and Julia’s choices govern the novel and the play and Sarah Morris has the task of communicating the breakneck speed of decisions that have to be made. As various characters note, life in this ward involves temporal distortions – a day that will never end nonetheless flashes by in an instant. Time is relative to action and the action never stops.
Ghaliah Conroy is magnificent as Bridie. There is something about the way Bridie towers over Julia that actually accentuates the former’s vulnerability. She is an overgrown child – an infantilised prisoner – someone for whom the freedoms of adulthood are an impossible dream. Yet she is also intoxicated by the experience of “mattering” or “making a difference”. The three days she spends on the ward might seem nightmarish to anyone else but to Bridie the intensity and urgency of action are everything. She is at the heart of something meaningful.
Morris and Conroy dance awkwardly towards their rooftop kiss – a moment of unreserved beauty in the cruellest of worlds.
Perhaps the one awkward performance (perhaps it isn’t even to do with the actual performance) is Maeve Fitzgerald as Dr Kathleen Lynn. She seems to be the least realistic character – despite the fact that she is the only real character – the only historically authentic character we see. Of course, Aristotle theorised this very paradox, the paradox that composite characters and composite actions are more plausible on stage than historical characters and historical actions. The actual is not always probable. At times, in the context of this dramatised situation, Dr Lynn feels like a character who so desperately ought to exist that it becomes difficult to believe that she really did exist.
I do not know if I have ever witnessed on stage depictions of such prolonged and overlapping physical pain. Bridie and Julia are spinning plates when it comes to rapid decisions as to whose agony it is most important to relieve. Sometimes the pangs are consecutive, sometimes they are simultaneous, and there are rare moments when nobody is especially in pain. Rare ones.
This is a short play, but nonetheless I do think that one of the reasons why it plays without an interval is that some members of the audience might prefer not to come back.
conradbrunstrom 