Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I sleep too little, I work too hard. I have ambitions – material, professional, artistic – that go largely unrealised and spend most of my time doing what Ian Dury summarised in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll as “business you don't like”. Life is hard and full of compromises and yet I wake up and face it day after day. Why do I do it? I make a good wage but I'm not really fussed by fancy stuff or expensive crap, and I reckon I could be just as happy – happier even! – dreaming my life away sitting in a public library in a malodorous alcoholic fug. Yet, I go on. What drives me to it, and keeps me going back for more?

These are the questions that literature asks us to consider and – at it's best – answers for us. The purpose of literature (I think) is to tell us truths that are not easily or convincingly conveyed in other ways, things that might sound banal or straight forward when articulated directly, but that inform our whole beings. To really know them, to really understand we have to see them in action, to be shown not told (to paraphrase that crusty old rubric) how life is.

Big Babies on CBBC

EDIT: Okay, I can't scale the youtube vid of the credits right so here's a link instead. Bloody web 2.0 harshing my social networking mellow!

We've become big fans of this show in my house. It revolves around an old fashioned comedy duo - uptight Brooks and genial fool Rocco - and their small, baby adventures. They've got some recurring friends - notably baby rapper The Gonch - and their toys (featured in the credits) provide a chicken littley sub-plot for each episode.

The effect of grown-up actor faces combined with baby bodies is wonderfully grotesque, and the faces and dialogue occasionally makes witty use of the random flailing of baby limbs. The design and voice work on the toys is also very nice.

The toys aren't quite as funny as Brooks and Rocco, but I suspect the big babies might get tiresome without the toy plots to break them up a little, and at fifteen minutes an episode it never quite outstays its welcome. Highly recommended to parents and stoned students/unemployed!

FURTHER EDIT: Ooh, here's a cool clip featuring The Gonch from the CBBC site.

How To Train Your Dragon

Believe it or not, I was once quite a cineaste. I studied film at uni for two years. When I lived in Wellington in New Zealand in my twenties, I was a member of the film society and a film festival regular, and in London I used spend a lot of time in the cinemas at the NFT, the ICA and those live soundtrack events at the Royal Festival Hall (John Cale doing The Hidden, Kronos Quartet on Dracula, Faust on obscure silent horror Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages). God, I had an opinion on everyone and everything, and if I'm drunk enough I can still dredge up some of the fragments, but everything I ever thought or knew about the great art of cinema has been kicked to death by a parade of children's movies.

People tell us that we're living in a golden age of kids movies – don't believe them! If this is the golden age, then I can only assume that previous generations of children's films were long lectures where kids were called idiots and instructed to go outside and murderously toxic fast food and deadening imagination-free toys.

Look what's happened to Disney! It's a crime what they've done to one of cinema's great pioneers. Say what you like about Walt, he was driven to create movies that stand the test of time. Snow White, Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty have become iconic representations of the tales with good reason – both are filled with dark and light, with all them menace and redemptive power of folklore. Things started coming unstuck with the insipid Cinderella, and the fifties ushered in a period of less interesting films occasionally saved – as in The Jungle Book – by a great soundtrack. Nowadays they shit out inexplicable horrors like Aladdin and The Little Mermaid with the instinctual robot cynicism of Skinner's pigeon.

But Walt wasn't in the movie business anymore. He'd set his sights on something else, and his ambitions took him away from film making down a path that led to a creepy ersatz multiculturalism and utopian futurism that was just a Hubbard away from being a mind-controlling puritanical religion. By the time of One hundred and One Dalmations and The Aristocats, they couldn't seem to create a movie that didn't seem cheap, lifeless and oddly creepy. I mean, while Phil Harris is great as Baloo, he sounds like a drunk in Robin Hood and a child molester in The Aristocats.

I didn't go to the movies a lot as a small kid, before I was ten or so, but I can remember stuff like Escape to Witch Mountain, Herbie, Charlotte's Web, Benji, Bugsy Malone, Pete's Dragon – yeah, okay, the seventies was pretty thin, but in those days movies were feeling the bite from TV. When I think of my early media education it's all Sesame Street, Vision On, Playaway, Dr Who, Bagpuss, The Clangers and shows of that kind of vintage. It was a great era for children's TV, but for movies, it was an uphill battle.

That changed in 1977, when Star Wars began the cross-marketed licensing juggernaut that forms the basis of the film industry strategy today, but the technology they were really waiting for was CGI. As soon as Toy Story showed it could be done, it opened the flood gates for a new generation of movie franchises that could hide their creative vacuity behind pin-sharp CGI and, now, 3D. As a parent, I have bravely sat through a steady run of witless crap like Monsters Vs Aliens, Kung Fu Panda, Ice Age (1,2 &3!), Antz (with Woody Allen!), The Bee Movie (Jerry Seinfeld!) and the Satanically repulsive Cars.

I suppose I shouldn't complain too much, though. Toy Story 1 & 2 are both genuinely great films (I am dubious about a third outing), Monsters Inc is saved by terrific performances from John Goodman and Billy Crystal, and there's a lot of inoffensive stuff, no worse than Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, for example, a movie I still love while recognising it's limitations. I'm thinking movies like Desperaux, Spiderwick Chronicles, Madagascar (another one saved by great comic performances) and, the subject of today's non-review, How To Train Your Dragon.

I mean, I am thankful that there aren't shitty toys, McDonald's tie-ins and a trailer for How To Train Your Dragon 2, but this film didn't have much going for it outside the production design, which was extremely imaginative and evocative. The kids get a typical believe-in-yourself story, a lot of lines that have the size and shape of jokes without having any witty content and some really dreadful voice acting. In particular, I have no idea why they wanted to have the grwon-up Vikings have Scottish accents and the young kids be voiced by horrible American stand-up comedy voices. It was like the whole thing was cutting between Terry Jones's Erik the Viking and Bob Saget providing the voice over for America's Funniest Home Videos.

Oh well, the kids enjoyed it well enough and at least I got out of seeing Nanny Mc-shitting-Phee.

Retribution Falls

I used to think that holiday reading is a publishing market segment that is constituted almost entirely of non-readers. Books promoted as perfect for the beach and the sun tan oil are aimed at people who only read one book a year or those that only ever read shit. When I go on holiday, it's a chance to tackle something hefty, something challenging and new. I can do with the brainless stuff, when I'm semi-conscious on the DLR in the morning shambling my way to work like a Romero zombie, driven entirely by habit. At these times I want easy to understand plots, broad characters and logical sequences of action.

That's what I used to think. Then I had children.

Before I had children, days in the sun spent darting on guide book tours of temples and museums were punctuated by leisurely longueurs in cafes (street or beach-side) with a cool glass of the local lager and a plate of whatever strangely preserved morsel was the local nibble. Before I had children reading time was provided by long bus trips to remote attractions post-it noted in the guide book before we left. Before I had children, there always seemed to be time to snatch a few dozen pages, or even settle down and read a hundred at a stretch if there was nothing else to do.

Alas, those days are long passed. Today, every historical site or local attraction is a headache-inducing dredge through high school history and classics at a quarter century remove, in an attempt to answer questions that begin with “where are we?” and inevitably end somewhere like “is God real?”, “when was the first person in Europe?” and “what was there before moon appeared?” Today, every long journey requires a constant stream of patter, tricks and reassurances to get the children through without having them scream everybody's nerves into jelly.

Today's reading is restricted to the last withered hours of consciousness at the end of a day, when excited, excitable children have finally worn themselves out into sweaty somnolence, and towels and toys and piles of interesting shells and rocks and bits of wood have been cleared aside. On my most recent trip, two things helped me to get some solid reading done on my latest journey:

The first was the invention of the Nintendo DS, a boon to parents everywhere and a mind-numbing joy for children.

The second was Retribution Falls, a jolly adventure story from Chris Wooding that suited exactly the sun-struck and child-shocked days of spring holidays. It's an old fashioned story of blazing airship combat, hair-raising dogfights and a dash of criminal shennanigans. While the airships suggest steampunk, this novel is set in a secondary world fantasy realm, where steampunk engineering mixes with supernatural phenomena and daemonic magic. It's a kind of post-enlightenment heroic fantasy, where the old magic (and suggestions of forgotten and proscribed knowledge) sit side by side with a variation of ordinary science.

If you've ever played a computer adventure game called Arcanum, you'll have an idea of the sort of thing. In fact, and I mean this with utmost respect, this book reads a lot like the better sort of gaming fiction. The major skill gaming has taken from sf and fantasy is world building. I don't think it's a coincidence that mainstream heroic fantasy and pen and paper games evolved at the same time, and I think the fictional approach to world building cross-fertilised. More and more writers began creating worlds for stories to happen in rather stories around which worlds were created.

Retribution Falls has that intense level of granularity and detail. It is easy to believe in the world beyond the characters, that there's business and goings on off screen. Secondary characters all have a well thought out place in the world, they all come with a back story consistent with elements of established continuity, they all fit their little niche in a calculated milieu.

There are times when this maybe goes a little too far. Combined with the old fashioned story and broad characterisation, it sometimes feels a bit like flavour fiction in a gaming manual. This is perhaps because of the main cast's habit of over analysing things, and so piloting the Ketty Jay sometimes reads a little like a series of skill rolls, and Crake often seems to be totting up his magic points before he cooks up a little deamonism.

Under other circumstances I might have been more impatient with the straight forward plotting, and I can't help wishing that Wooding was a little harder hearted and killed off a character or two on the way through, just to show us he meant business. Maybe things are a little easy for the crew of the Ketty Jay, but even so they make good company for frazzled evenings semi-conscious on the sandy settee with a glass of the local poison to ease the sandblasted headache.

Hooray for the Pet Avengers!

This is turning into parents' day here at Pointless Philosophical Asides, but I see with great happiness that a new series (hope that link works) of The Pet Avengers is imminent. Both my children enjoyed this alot. It made a really special end to our monthly(ish) trips to the comics shop that we could sit together on the train home and all read and enjoy this. Hats off to Marvel for creating a real family friendly series!

Peppa Pig is a capitalist running dog

I was delighted when I first found Peppa Pig on TV. It's a charming, funny series made with style and panache. Both my kids enjoy it (although Himself feels too old for it now) and it doesn't revolve around anyone, male or female, with an unfeasible physique (allowing for the expressionistic extremes of Daddy Pigs rotundity).

However, as the years have passed I've become increasingly bewildered by the depth and tenacity of the cross marketing. There are books, obviously, and then toys - well, okay - but then you start burrowing down into the wendy houses, bed sheets, party invitations, puppet sets, Easter eggs, cultery sets and anything that any child is ever likely to need ever.

This seems to be the strategy for kids properties these days. It's almost impossible to buy toys that are not related to media or to watch a show that's not trying to sell you toys. Star Wars is the worst (obviously!) but at least it aims for an age group outside for the nursery (even if nursery age kids are sometimes caught in the cross fire).

Lego is a serial offender these days - Star Wars Lego was cute, but the new Ben 10 Lego toys are wearyingly awful. (Himself looked them over long and hard at the most recent disbursement of pocket money before opting for a couple of smaller Lego Atlantis toys - a good decision, in my opinion). These are not cool toys created by people who love children. These are cynical marketing ploys aimed at fleecing kids from their cash. Adults are somewhat to blame, as the trend of Peter Pan-ish nerds to buy toys like this has already made the Star Wars line overly model-oriented (rather than emphasising free building).


Ah well, I suppose it was ever so. They'll be old enough soon to see for themselves, I hope. In the meantime, I guess we'll just have to renew our subs to Okido and keep our fingers crossed.