Beware, if you are discovered breaking the masquerade, you must either become part of it, or join those who fight or police it.

Jindabyne

I've no problem with films which are stacked with characters who are thoroughly unlikable; what I find less easy to cope with are ones in which the characters all thoroughly unlikable idiots.

We watched this underwhelming two-hour slog based solely upon Mark Kermode's glowing recommendation.

Thanks, Kermode. THERMODE.

So I'm back from one week spent holidaying in the French Republic. In fact I've been back six days, but it's not as if anyone has this place permanently loaded in their browser, crabbed hand hovering over the refresh button. I would hope.

As it is, I had intended to do a series of posts about Wot I Did on My Holiday, a kind of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday thing, etc., not only filled with my profound musings on our encounters with the Frencher psyche and culture, but also bursting with the minutiae of our daily activities.

But that would be fucking insufferable, so I'll instead mention just a couple things which stuck in my mind about the trip.

Driving on the Other Side of the Road

Time spent worrying about Having to Drive on the Other Side of the Road is a peculiarly British obsession. "Oooh, how did you cope, having to driiive on the other side of the roaaaad?" I've now been asked about twenty billion times. However! For the curious amongst you, or for those who are plain apprehensive about having to do in the future and require advice, I now offer a simple one-step guide to Driving on the Other Side of the Road:

You just drive. On the other side. Of the fucking road.

There's no special trick to it, no great mystery. It really is that simple. Still unconvinced? Then by all means print this page off if you want, to keep with your Google Maps route printout in the glove compartment for ease of reference. Y'know, should you ever have any trouble. Driving on the other side of the fucking road.

Now go away and never ask me this again or I'll chop your fucking feet off.

The "Bloody" French

In defiance of stereotype, every single Frencher we met was exceedingly courteous and gracious. And therefore incredibly irritating: before our holiday I'd spent several weeks doing a crash course in Frenchspeak by former professional Nazi-buster and all-round superhero, Michel Thomas. In fact, I'd got quite good at it, and I was looking forward to impressing those we met with my l33t language skills. I was looking forward to discussing la situation politique with our neighbours, to having conversations somewhat more in depth than asking the location of the nearest supermarket in a VERY LOUD VOICE.

Only no. I couldn't. Because almost without exception, whenever I opened my trap to spurt out some well-considered (if strongly accented) statement or question, the person I was speaking to would reply in English. In better English than my French, I had no doubt, so it would therefore have been impolite of me to insist on speaking French and holding up the conversation for longer than strictly necessary. Fuckers. If I were a xenophobe I'd suspect some kind of cultural superiority complex was at play. Good job I'm not then, oh no. No siree.

So apart from mentioning that I spent a good portion of our last day with my hands inside the u-bend of the toilet, I'll leave it more or less at that. Though to offset the white-van-man musings of the above and to end on a more positive note, rather brilliantly, our holiday coincided with the nearest large town's annual medieval festival:

Getting into the swing of things (ho ho):

Je vais en France demain. Je reviens en une semaine.

Au revioir!

We make life miserable for ourselves and others so that death doesn't seem such a terrifying concept. To make the world a better place, to achieve understanding of ourselves and the universe, to live in peace and harmony with one another in joy would be to strengthen the blow of our eventual mortality.

We make a habit of it; indeed, of everything, when habit and routine are nothing but lies, designed to fool us into thinking that something is lasting, when in fact nothing is.

On and on, until maximum entropy has been achieved, life is extinguished and the final black holes have evaporated; until all matter that once made up the galaxies has degenerated, and the lowly photon is king of the universe.

Still, if the second law of thermodynamics is good for nothing else, it at least enables you to superchill your drink in two minutes.

Now available via your high-speed internet tubes, pictures from the tenth-anniversary Trans-Ice Internet Meet (TIIM)-based brainstorming session, 30th June 2007 @ The Bricklayer's Arms in London's fashionable London.

Click on the picture above, or follow the link here for more.

EDIT: Link fixed, thanks.

This video is perhaps less flashy than some similar sequences I've seen, but it is testament to how such a simple idea can still have the power to stagger the mind:

Deadwood was good. In fact it was excellent, often brilliant. But as with most television shows, it took a few episodes to click 100%. And so I used to tell people that, yes, of course it's very good and all that, but it's no Carnivale, West Wing or Firefly, you're an idiot for even suggesting it.

But at some undefined point during its run it somehow managed to sidle unnoticed into the same bracket of excellence in which I held these shows, so that when Rome started up I found myself telling people that, yes, of course, it's very good and all that, but it's no Deadwood, you must be some kind of fucking crazy person!

And then it ended, after three short seasons. Well-used by now to the fact of my favourite shows being cancelled, I reacted to this news with a mere, "fucking HBO", sighed and moved on. But not without making a mental note to watch out for what showrunner David Milch did next.

What he did next was unexpected. He signed up immediately for another HBO series, this one about a family of surfers - their trials, tribulations and, from the descriptions I'd read at least, what looked to be their tedious and interminable domestic squabbles. It's certainly not the kind of thing I'd normally go out of my way to watch, and I was in two minds whether to even bother with it. But Milch's record on NYPD Blue and, of course, Deadwood had earned him my attention for one episode at least, and so I tuned in (metaphorically-speaking; I'm in the UK after all) for its pilot without really looking forward to it.

John From Cincinnati certainly wasn't what I was expecting. It's either the most pretentious or the most intriguing show of the summer TV season, I can't decide. The show is in the main concerned with a legendary family of surfers, the Yosts, each with their own dreary-sounding issue to explore on a week-to-week basis: estrangement; senility; serious drug addiction – all the stock TV situations, ready off-the-shelf. Chief among the Yosts is ageing patriarch Mitch; his main concern is in actively shunning the celebrity and associated difficulties his former surfing glories have brought the family, preferring instead to spend his days practising his art (and make no mistake: he, and the show, see it very much as such) in seclusion, away from the prying eyes of shifty agents and even his own family.

But into this domestic dysfunction add the arrival of the Mysterious Stranger™ (the eponymous John, from Cincinnati presumably), a classic man-child with a gift for mimicry, and things start to look a little more interesting. Immediately befriending the family in a less-than-plausible manner, his appearance coincides with a number of strange, and possibly supernatural events.

Oh, and one or more or all of the characters may or may not be Jesus Christ. Now I wasn't expecting that.

The tone is a little uneven in places, one moment downbeat and sombre, the next purposefully eccentric (Teddy wipes out!), and this juxtaposition isn't as well-handled as it was during Deadwood's very occasional forays onto the same quirky ground, but for now it all makes for fascinating viewing. As I say, it could go either way – as one character remarks no less than five times, "some things I know and some things I don't" – but Milch has won my interest for one more episode at least.

I'm a bit late with this, but as of, er, now, I'll no longer be using my Plusnet e-mail address (steve@greatbeyond.plus.com). This is because after several years of happy service (and a couple maybe less happy), I've terminated my account with Plusnet and migrated to Sky.

I'll still check the old e-mail address from time to time, but I don't know how long it'll stay active now I've cancelled. Instead, for now please use the gmail address given on the sidebar on the right.

Oh, and I'm hoping to update this place with something a little more substantial soon, but don't hold your breath. I've been rather busy lately; unfortunately, not with a lot I can think of as interesting enough to blog about.

I didn't just see BBC News equating the first woman commentator in the history of Match of the Day with women's suffrage, did I? No, I really did just see that. Despite doing the job as capably and without fuss as her male colleagues on Radio Five for years now, the BBC has chosen to trumpet-blast Jacqui Oatley's forthcoming coverage of Saturday's Premiership game between Fulham and Blackburn with all the desperate boastfulness one comes to expect of the corporation nowadays. Ooh, look at us, aren't we so progressive?

Follow that up with a ham-fisted and earnest studio discussion and the denigration is surely complete. Only not, because, look: here's a clip of her commentating for another station! Oh good, because I was worried she wouldn't be up to the job, what with her being a bird and everything. FFS. I'm not sure who should feel more belittled: Jacqui Oatley - who looks uncomfortable at all the attention, surely preferring to just get on with it – or the Match of the Day audience this segment was obviously aimed at, desperate to convince that she can do the job just as well as a man, honest.

Surely true parity between the sexes will only have been achieved when something like this can happen without such a fuss being made. It's been turned into something now by the BBC, but given her regular appearances on Final Score and Radio Five, I guarantee that few would even have batted an eyelid were Gary Lineker to have handed off to Jacqui in the same understated manner as he does to any of the male commentators this Saturday. Indeed, my first reaction to the story this morning, before it dived headlong into a murky bog of condescension, was "oh, has she not appeared on the programme before? I can't say I'd noticed."

When even the notoriously self-congratulatory Hollywood finally awarded the Oscar to a black actor without pissing up its own back this year (unlike when they saw fit to grant the honour to Denzel in 2001, complete with pompous remarking at how truly enlightened they were), the BBC is without doubt several steps off the pace of change.

#313

Should you lose an item, or be temporarily unaware of the location of a friend or colleague, under no circumstances should you joshingly state that, "he must have strayed into Iranian waters."

It was half-funny the first couple of times. Y'know, when I did it. But now, a couple of weeks after the event, it just makes you look like an unimaginative prick. For God's sake, give it another eight months or so and Radio 4's resident 'comedy' fucktards Punt and Dennis will be reeling that one out for the Christmas special, the twat-filled audience braying in blind, idiot appreciation at its topicality.

#314

"PCB Board" – I hear this every single frakking day at work. Without fail. In an office full of the most brilliant engineering minds Sheffield has to offer. Come on, people! Do I have to resort to administering Pavlovian conditioning to right this terrible wrong, kicking you in the balls with all my might every time you utter this wilful distortion of our dear language?

Yes. Yes, I think I do.

More blind rage next week, kids! (Grinding of gears optional).

A couple of reminders for those who care about such things, and to myself for that matter: the long-awaited sixth season of superb cop drama The Shield began last night, and should now be available from the usual sources.

It isn't actually the next season proper; these ten episodes were originally intended to form the second half of the fifth. They were held back until now presumably to give those involved in its production some time off; showrunner Shawn Ryan had previously expressed concern about maintaining the quality of the show while he divided his duties between this and his other hit, The Unit (which I haven't seen, though my brother assures me of its quality). Star Michael Chiklis has also been busy away from the show with other projects.

The seventh, concluding season, will air sometime in 2008.

Raines is another such long-delayed show. Originally slated for January, NBC finally saw fit to begin airing its first (and probably last) season a couple of weeks ago. Most of those who saw the pilot when it became available all the way back in September 2006 expressed their admiration for this superior detective drama. Including me.

Since then, significant changes have been made. For starters, NBC has cut the number of episodes from thirteen (standard for a mid-season replacement) to seven, which doesn't bode well for its longevity. And the sidekick/conscience role (previously occupied by Luis Guzmán in the pilot) has been recast, presumably due to the actor's availability than any sense that he was disliked by the focus groups. Madeleine Stowe has also joined the permanent cast, as a psychiatrist hired by Raines' worried boss to probe into his recent eccentric behaviour.

Unfortunately, the high standards set by the pilot have not wholly endured. The second episode, story-wise, is weak and predictable, a cliché-ridden affair reminiscent of Bones at its most lazy and patronising. And the show's hook (that of Raines' ability to converse with imaginary constructs of the dead) is a liability when planted clumsily into such infertile ground. Madeleine Stowe does bring a little class to her role, though it surely doesn't deserve it; her psychiatrist is a lazily-written stereotype for now. Hopefully she'll be given added dimension with subsequent appearances. Though with only five episodes remaining, the opportunities are diminishing.

But it's not all bad. When not focused on the disposable plot (some crap we've seen a thousand times before about Latino immigrants), the show shines. Never brighter than when Goldblum is on screen. He is utterly compelling and bags some great lines. His languid performance is the glue which seeps into the cracks and stops this episode from falling apart. He should be given his own show or something. Oh.

I'll continue to watch, but NBC's treatment of it notwithstanding, I can't see a future for this unless they figure out how to make proper use of the gimmick (which was fluffed both in this episode and to a certain extent in the pilot), and unless they get someone on board who can write a good mystery on which to hang it.

It’s mid-season replacement time, which means a minor glut of yet more new television shows to ignore. I already did Raines last year, but two other new shows landed in my inbox at the weekend:

The Riches

Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver star in a new hourlong drama (the pilot clocks in at 57 minutes) for the FX cable channel. Izzard plays the Father, Driver the Mother, to a family of thieving Gypsies. Literally: the pre-credits sequence shows the family grifting their way through a school reunion; while Izzard assumes the identity of a no-show, charming his way around the room with unmatched self-assurance, his son and daughter pick the pockets and handbags of the other attendees, who are too rapt with Izzard’s showboating to notice.

After faffing around for what seems an age with subplots of varying quality, the high-concept premise finally arrives with the abruptness of the car crash which heralds it. While on the run from Driver’s extended clan (for reasons too contrived to go into), the family accidentally kill a very wealthy couple (the eponymous "Riches") who were on their way to start a new life on the other side of the country.

Izzard’s reaction is to dump the evidence into a nearby lake and have his family assume the identities of the Riches, moving into their new home in a rich suburb to live their own warped version of the American Dream. Naturally.

But despite this ludicrousness, it isn’t a bad show. As expected, Izzard's American accent is all over the place, pitched somewhere between a Southern drawl and the one he employed to such, um, memorable effect in Mystery Men. It is distracting at times, but if you can get past that, he isn’t half bad here. The effortless charm he employs to win over his well-heeled neighbours does the same for the audience, and he gets the chance to shine during a couple of more reflective moments too.

Though I could have done without the gratuitous show of his bare arse during an unconvincing sex scene with Minnie Driver (who plays convincingly against type as his slightly more rough-hewn wife).

All in all, it’s not unenjoyable fare. If they can fix the problems with the wildly varying tone, it could very well be a winner. And while there are no mentions of jam to speak of, which will come as a disappointment to some, Minnie Driver's head does appear to have been replaced by a strawberry. Really.

Andy Barker, P.I.

22-minute sitcom in which a mild-mannered self-employed accountant, played by Andy Richter, is mistaken for a private detective on his first day in the office. "Hilarity ensues" when he gets mixed up in a case straight out of Chinatown, and finds he likes it a bit too much.

It’s inoffensive enough; Richter is likeable in the lead, and there are some ideas with a bit of potential: the Afghan restaurateur next door who, after 9/11, went a bit too far to prove his love of the US by decking out his entire eatery in garish stars, stripes and imperfectly-translated patriotic slogans, and the video-store owner's "we don’t have Meet the Fokkers".

But that’s probably all it is at the moment: a bunch of nice ideas with potential. Actual laugh-out-loud moments are thin on the ground; it produces good-natured smiles more than anything. And despite having a large enough budget to stage a convincing car chase, the rest of the production feels a little amateurish and, in places, just cheap.

I’m told the subsequent episodes up the joke-quotient significantly, so it may be worth sticking with, especially considering dearth of decent sitcoms currently on offer. At present, only Scrubs finds itself on my must-watch list. Andy Barker, P.I. probably won’t, but it's done just enough with this pilot to get a second chance.