Killing two turds with one stone

Now there isn't much that Vlad and I agree on, but there are two things which have exercised our combined ire recently.

1) The existence of Avatar fans.

I don't mean people who saw the film and thought it was okay, who were impressed by the effects but not much else. I mean the hardcore fanbase which has sprung up in the last couple of months and is spreading on the internet like bubonic plague. Unsympathetic souls have christened them "Avatards".

First of all, this review explains why the film is overrated, dull and manipulative.

Yet it's just the sort of thing that seems to suck people in. Using a highly scientific method of measuring internet opinion, I typed "avatar is shit" into Google. It got 24 million hits. If I type "avatar is awesome", it gets twice as many. That can't be right.

There are Avatar forums devoted to dealing with post-Avatar depression - for people who are depressed, I should add, not because they just paid good money to put on some silly glasses and be bored for two hours, but because after being sucked into Cameron's cliched and preachy utopian fairytale they find themselves unable to deal with the imperfections of the real world.

And while the film has its share of normal fans, there are some who regard it as a life-changing experience, a call to arms for social and political revolution. It's basically provoked a crude form of environmental activism for people with short attention spans and a penchant for blue faces.

Personally I don't see how the derivative "alien" culture of the Na'vi (another pet hate: arbitrary use of apostrophes in alien or fantasy names) can inspire anyone but the most feeble minded. Honestly. It's a hokey mush of noble savage clichés and a language that any skilled linguist could bash out over a weekend.

Worst of all, now my toes curl in embarrassment every time I hear someone use the phrase "I see you". Thanks, Cameron. You've spawned another generation of confused sci-fi nerds whose idea of personal fulfilment is to waste their time learning to live a pretend culture and language, as though Star Trek didn't already fulfil that need. Tolkien, as a professional philologist, constructed his fantasy languages for his own half-secret personal enjoyment. He never expected that anyone would take the trouble to learn them.

2) U2, especially Bono

Vlad has already covered Bono's latest insult to humanity, i.e. his continued existence. U2's 2009 tour helped the band reap over $100m last year and involved perhaps the largest physical expression of arrogance ever made by any rock band, including U2.

Compensating for something, Bono?

One would think that a band which was able to impress people with its musical skill wouldn't need to resort to stuff like this. What's Bono going to do next, rebuild the Pyramid of Cheops on the banks of the Liffey as his burial tomb?

I gladly concede that U2 has had some good moments. Sunday Bloody Sunday is a decent protest song, and I think With Or Without You is a beautiful ballad. But they've produced no more than you'd expect for a band which has lasted three times longer than Napoleon's empire and produced a dozen more full-length albums than he managed. As the saying goes, you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it's gonna stick.

The best you can say about them is that they haven't got any worse in the last thirty years, but that's mostly because they haven't developed at all. There's a simple test. Listen to their 1980 debut album Boy, and then listen to 2009's No Line On The Horizon, and try to identify any meaningful progression apart from the increased pretension of the title. The same echoey guitar riffs, the same warbling vocals, the same vacuous lyrics.

Being unable to expand into new creative areas in all that time, apart from regular forays into whatever they judged to be cool at the time (pacifism and Americana in the 80s, techno in the 90s, themselves in the 2000s), must be indicative of a serious lack of talent. But then U2 has always been mostly about impressing people. They are like the golden boy who is a little too eager to prove himself to his parents because he knows, deep down, that he isn't really all that golden.

For an example of a band which has developed ten times as much as U2 in half the time, you could do worse than listen to the back catalogue of Wilco. Jeff Tweedy doesn't need massive robot crabs to impress people.

That sounds like a line from a cheap novelette

Moogface came for a visit last week and we went about doing things in Vienna, kicking off an action-packed few days with a craaazy two-hour seminar with visiting medievalist Prof. Philippe Buc at the Institute for Medieval Research. I know how to treat a lady!

Then we took the subway to Prater, site of a big funfair which promised craziness without bounds. Unfortunately everything was closed because it was the middle of fucking winter, something which had escaped my notice. We shuffled about in the snow for a bit and Moogface made full use of the only form of entertainment available by sticking her head in this thing, which killed an hour or so. She is easily amused.

It's probably a good thing that Dizzy Mouse was shut.

But the fun didn't stop with medieval seminars and closed funfairs, oh no! We also went to Latin mass in the undercroft of the cathedral, which was like normal mass except more penitential due to the lack of cushion kneelers and comprehensibility. Mel Gibson was actually standing in the corner inviting people to whip him.

And we watched an old black and white film in a musty little cinema. (It was The Third Man of course, so mustiness is part of the experience.) This necessitated a trip on the Riesenrad, although our plan to re-enact the famous scene from the film was thwarted by the old couple sharing our cabin, and the locks on the doors.

"Or do ghosts only fly by night, Dr Winkel? You got an opinion on that?"

Moogdroog also managed to use some kind of secret healing powers to fix me, or at least I made a sudden improvement on the day of her arrival, which meant I was actually able to take her around the city and we didn't have to stay in my flat watching badly dubbed episodes of Friends and repeats of The Weakest Link, which is about the only show broadcast on BBC Entertainment.

I saw my physio for the last time yesterday and she ran out of things to do to me. With luck I'll be fit enough to try a short run in a couple of weeks. Six weeks of crippledom has taught me two things: 1) be careful when sledging; 2) Vienna is a good place to get sick. There are so many doctors here, chances are your next door neighbour will be one. The doctor I went to was actually called Dr Galen. You don't get any more highly qualified than that. I was half expecting my radiologist to be called Dr Xavier Ray.

Tomorrow I have to go to the Institute for a project meeting to discuss an article I've written for their latest edited volume. It's the first time the people here will be giving direct feedback on something I've written, and I'm fairly shitting myself at the prospect of their hardcore Viennese historiographical faces staring at me.

"So, Herr Dr Clay, please justify your academic existence."

That photo is from 1892 I admit, but the only thing to have changed is the intimidating facial hair. My only consolation is that nobody at the Institute is really an Anglo-Saxon expert, so they might not notice all the glaring historical errors I made.

Bellamy's People vs People Like Us

During our increasingly desperate attempts to find quality comedy on the internet, moogdroog and I recently rediscovered a late 90s BBC comedy series called People Like Us. I remember watching a couple of episodes when it was first broadcast and thinking it was amazing, but it sank into obscurity following the arrest of its creator, Chris Langham, under somewhat awkward circumstances, and as far as I know wasn’t given a repeat broadcast.

Now the BBC have kindly put the entire first series up on YouTube. I believe People Like Us was the first major attempt by a British comedian at the mockumentary format, years before Ricky Gervais tried it out it with rather more success. But whereas The Office, despite the mockumentary conceit, is still essentially a sitcom, People Like Us remains cruelly true to its adopted genre and is hence much more innovative, and also funnier.

Each episode deals with a different profession - solicitor, estate agent, photographer and so on - and follows about various characters. Chris Langham plays the (almost) never-seen interviewer Roy Mallard, his awkward, slightly confused voice always off camera, sometimes providing voiceovers which manage to twist rules of grammar and sense into increasingly convoluted balloon-animal sentences with a subtlety that borders on genius.

“The instinct to find a roof to put over our heads, like eating, copulation, and then sleeping, is something we share with the rest of the animal kingdom, except for animals that don’t have heads, like worms, or that don’t copulate, like worms either...”

Or the countless throwaway gags during interviews:

Roy Mallard: What would you be doing if you weren’t an estate agent?

Estate Agent: God… [looks confused]

Roy Mallard: I just meant hypothetically.

Estate Agent: Oh, right. I mean, I don’t think I am especially hypothetical.

Roy Mallard: Right.

Estate Agent: Not, you know, really.

Roy Mallard: No, fair enough.

Every other line, no matter who delivers it, is wonderful. The density of humour is amazing. The central characters in each episode, including Roy Mallard himself, are basically losers - frustrated, unlucky, well-meaning losers whom we admire because they fight so hard not to acknowledge their own tragedy. It helps that Langham enlisted an array of largely unknown but talented comic actors, many of whom are instantly recognisable now, David Tennant, Bill Nighy, Jessica Stevenson and Mark Heap among them.

The best way to appreciate this is to watch it immediately after half an hour (or as much as you can stand; I managed 15 minutes) of Bellamy’s People, the latest sewage to be oozed out of the BBC comedy pipe, which feels like an attempt by a 12 year old to combine People Like Us with Little Britain, but without the funny bits of either. The characters are tedious, one-dimensional stereotypes (look, it’s funny because he’s really fat!), the format is unconvincing and overblown (the show spends the first five minutes advertising itself), and, worst of all, Bellamy, with his trendy hair and stupid smug face, has none of the endearing helplessness that draws you into the world of Roy Mallard.

Comedy is an art form. And good art should be trying to say something. Sometimes comedy is sociopolitical satire (That Was The Week That Was, Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Thick Of It, The Day Today, The Armando Iannucci Shows) or ironic pop-cultural commentary (The Glam Metal Detectives, Spaced, Garth Marenghi's Dark Place), sometimes it lures us deep into the human condition and moves us with pathos (Fawlty Towers, Extras, Peep Show, The Royle Family, This Is Alan Partridge, The Office), or flips our world-view on its head with surreal brilliance (Round The Horne, The Goon Show, Monty Python, The Mighty Boosh, The League of Gentlemen). Often it is several of these things at once (Till Death Us Do Part). Sometimes it starts off promising and turns shit (Little Britain). Sometimes it is just shit (My Family). Occasionally it is even offensively shit (The Fast Show, most comedy on Radio 4, including the precursor to Bellamy's People, Down The Line).

Probably the best comedy of the last 20 years. Buy it!

Anyway, my point is that good comedy should leave you moved or enlightened, even if at a depth that makes you dig deep in yourself to find it. People Like Us does this brilliantly. The genius of the show is that it purports to be a clinical analysis of modern day (well, late 90s) English society, and through its artifice of incompetence, tragedy and emotional tension manages to tell us much more. Bellamy's People, on the other hand, is basically a freak show. Except all the freaks are fake. And who wants to pay to see that?