Mrs Lowry And Son.

I have to mention an exceptional movie I saw this week; Mrs Lowry And Son. Starring Venessa Redgrage and Timothy Spall. What a good week it has been for Vanessa Redgrave, recognised by The Crown for a lifetime of dedication to acting. And she looked so pleased to be receiving such an award. Even a little bemused that she should be rewarded for doing something she so obviously loves. Quite touching to see. That great artistes such as her are also so modest. She and Timothy Spall play a blinding two hander n this lyrical portrait of the relationship between mother and son and the art that seperated them. We get to peep around the net curtains into the lives of what is left of the Lowry family as they float and bob about in a sea of troubles of their own makings. Socially crippled they exist in a fragile, but hardy enough life on the fringe of poverty following a fall from a genteel existance that mostly only existed in the mind of Mrs Lowry. One moment the viewer is smiling the next tearing up. Probably. The diector does not assume familiarity with Lowry's paintings. We are introduced to their lives before we see what he is up to in the attic. Although the inspiration for much of the work is put before our eyes, to extrapolate as we wish. Loved the sequence with the reclyning Lowry on the wall and especially the origins of the bearded lady. It affords a simple dignity and an almost heavenly grace which will forever enrich that particular painting for me. Things might have been grim up North but they could also be beguilingly funny. Poverty and back breaking work can make, break and shape the whole of us. Humour frees our souls for moments at a time and we can survive by stumbling from one to the other. The heart may well break at times but reparations are possible, even when we find we do not actually like the ones we love, exposing an aggregate of suffering and unrequited hopes. The bedrock of family where we daily flounder and yet carry on. Its a beautiful piece of work. which magically, if subtly gives us a glimpse of what a piece of art sees while we stare at it. You will know the framing sequence I mean when you see the film for yourself. Which you really should do. There is a particularly affecting scene where Lowry is brushing his mother's hair. He is describing his day to his house bound ma, and he recounts seeing a lady with a beard. And it is how he describes this to his mother. Verbalising a gentle humanity and even love for a singular human being who in all probability faced abuse and discourtesy in a hard old world in hard old days. He painted her in a picture and that expression of love is there. As it is in everything he choose to put on canvas.

The Scarf Artist

He came, he saw, he knitted. Doctor Martin presented me with this beautiful scarft which he knitted especially for me. It took him three days and is just about one of the nicest things anyone has ever given me. He really has a great imagination and magic knitting fingers.Old Madame Nostradamus would turn green. Some one mentioned to me thay had seen him on a park bence knitting away, the very picture of the artist he is.

1973.

Theres A Light On At Arkham Asylum.

Theres a light on at Arkham asylum that never goes out. Just as well really, the inmates might get out.

Image Of The Fendahl.

Finished listening to this superb adaption of a classic Fourth Doctor tale, an audio adaption of the novel as written by Terrance Dicks from an original script by Chris Boucher. I do mean this is quite literally a classic tale, not just that is a story from the classic era. Its as close as one can get to a Quatermass tale as Doctor Who ever got, although it has come close on a number of occasions. Sharing its DNA as much as rifting on a Kneale trope. Actually, I am being a bit lazy there. It shares some themes and even the atmosphere of a situation when Science is mistaken for occult activity. Modern science does not make much room for miracles or deus ex machina moments as they devalue resolution. But as a means of drawing the listener down a dark path with goblin creatures on all sides this tight bit of speculative fiction really gets us there; "Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned 'round and turns no more his head, Because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tred." Its spoke near the start of the first episode. Beautifully intoned by Tom Baker in the transmitted episode, with the equally beautiful Louise Jameson pulling narrative chores on this three discer. And the Fendahl is a frightful fiend. From its sibilant hissing and dragging to its giant alien tapeworm appearance it is one of the nastiest looking, and sounding, nightmare creatures ever to drag its way into the life of The Doctor and his companions. Its weird and almost Lovecraftian, so terrible a life form that the frightened Time-lords tried to eraze all knowledge of its existance from the universe, going as far as to timelock its homeworld. A tale too terrible to tell? Chris Boucher delivered a pretty taut horror thriller, amazing to think this reached a family audience of millions, given how truly horrible the Fendahl is. He must have felt on a creative high, writing this and some really exciting Blakes Seven stuff around the same time. The BBC produced some amazing and hugely influential stuff around this era. An era which predates social media, an era mostly without agendas outweighing the basic call to entertain.Sure, wedge issues could come in under the radar but never to the extent where it was crushingly obvious and drama killingly stifling. This story is literally a warning to the curious. Be ready and beware the answers one may find when digging deep. Like the greedy dwarves of Moria who dug too deep and sealed their own doom. The fluidity of the script is aided by a perfect reading by a wonderfully adaptive actress; Louise Jameson. It helps she played the main character Leela I suppose but she is a woman of many talents. A writer and a director as well. Her voice shifts from narrator to companion effortlessly, talented people like her make it sound easy, which I am quite sure it is not. I have heard her speak quite a bit now, among the many afterwards on the Big Finish CD extras. She is smart and witty and very generous with praise for those who have earned it. i had always hoped for a meeting at some point between her and a current Doctor, perhaps on Galifrey, in the very hell of The Time War. It has not happened yet but....

Hilary Mantel.

I was saddened to hear this great lady has passed. Just today a friend messaged me to say so. Another fan of her work. And what a body of work that is. I say "is" rather than "was" as her work will stand the test of ages and always remain current. As if the work could pass along with the creator. As with so many I was mesmerised at times by the viseral power of her work.One moment alone in The Mirror And The Light caught me like a winding blow to the stomach. When the enemies of Thomas Cromwell set about her like a biblical pack of jackals and we felt his fall as though we had taken up residence in his mind.An illusion off course but the coceit was we thought we knew when in fact we only felt. Thats as real as it gets.And its going to have to do. I have seen a few of her talks online. And they are wry bittersweet affairs.She was witty, insightful and more than anything else she caused me to slow down, to think at the same speed I was absorbing her words.A Cliff Notes absorbtion of her words is not reading her at all. Like light reflecting on shifting water, each wave concealing more than it showed. The work remains. Sensibly upright, timeless tomes that might well gather dust but never age. One cannot help but feel another age has passed. There has been so much of that off late.But unlike the monarchial regeneration no one steps into the shoes of lost authors. No cross of office, no orb of significance. Broken staffs signifying an end of service makes more sense to me now. Even as much as spilled ink or blunted quill or the pages blank and unused that will remain so. No more tales to tell. The Queen is dead.

Androids Of Tara.

Blimey, was not expecting this. Began what I thought would be a straight forward enough adaption of what i remember from the television series and within a couple of pages there was mention of feudal slavery, apocalyptic diseases decimating the population of Tara and even mention of terrifing coersive bed hopping and death by being buried alive. Told at a jaunty angle, as though to say "get a load of this medieval lot". Even as a thinly read Belfastian like my fourteen year old self, as I was in 1978 when this story was first transmitted, could tell this was a pastiche of some similar materia ( the Prisoner Of Zenda and possibly Herges King Ottaker's Sceptre. Probably because it felt so familiar in a BBC classic adaption sort of way, I barely considered Tara to be an alien planet , more a faux-Latveria filled with swah bucking high adventure and low paranoid robomania. Tara is a pecuiar city state stretched planet wide (as sci-fi stories tend to portray when visiting other worlds, one planet, one race, one weather system,one political and social system. its a long standing trope that has never made much sense but readers mostly go along with it without realising how odd this actually is.) The villan of the piece, Count Grendel of Gracht,as played by fantastic character actor Peter Jeffreys, pops up in proceedings as a worthy, if moustache-swirlingly swarthy, adversary for The Doctor. He plays a wicked counterpoint to our child-like but brilliant hero. Grendel is a selfish bully, born to the purple. Yet he is very much a product of the society he inhabits where he the percieved "good guys" operate around a very aggresive class bound system (They even threaten to murder The Doctor because he does not immediately sucumb to their demands!) The class system on Tara is feudal and just about as undemocratic as Doctor Doom's Latveria. Social mobility is an impossible dream on this world and The Doctor and Romanna do absolutely nothing to change this. Passing through as they do "on little cat feet" like the fog in the poem by Carl Sanburg. The Count Grendel, as the name would imply, is a Wrong 'un, and it comes through even stronger in David Fisher's clever and exciting little novelization. The second of two recently released and botyh have proved to be a hugely enjoyable addition to the Doctor Who library. It even ends with a golden age of Hollywood sword fight between The Count and The Doctor, playing out across the villan's castle lair. Yes, very enjoyable with cheeky and unexpected liberties taken with the expanded text which add to the fun.