A month of ironies

 

© Maverick / Warner Bros.

 

September 2025 reminds me of the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette.  The song’s lyrics contain many examples of things that are ironic, for example, “An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” or “a free ride when you’ve already paid”, or “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.”  Although, as the comedian Ed Byrne has pointed out, some of the situations mentioned in the song aren’t actually ironic.  “A traffic jam when you’re already late,” for example.  As Byrne observed, that’s really only ironic if you’re a city planner.

 

Anyway, should Alanis Morissette ever write a sequel to Ironic, the month that has just passed should provide her with more than enough material.  To me, it’s the most ironic month I’ve ever experienced.  Here are a few reasons why I think so.

 

[Incidentally, this blog-entry contains references to American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.  Please note that it’s possible to hold two opinions about Kirk at the same time, though many people out there are unable – or unwilling – to accept this.

 

Firstly, you can be horrified by Kirk’s murder, excoriate the fact that it happened while he was on a university campus exercising his right to free speech, and feel sorry for his young family.  Secondly and simultaneously, you can detest many of the things that came out of his mouth.  Things about black people.  (“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to… target white people, that’s a fact.  It’s happening more and more.”)  About women.  (“Reject feminism.  Submit to your husband, Taylor.  You’re not in charge…  And most importantly, I can’t wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert…  You’ve got to change your name.  If not, you don’t really mean it.”)  About Islam.  (“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”)  About trans-people.  (“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.  We need it immediately.”).  And so on.  Also, you can be dismayed by the fact he made himself very wealthy by saying such things.]

 

September 10th

Charlie Kirk once said this of American gun ownership and the attendant, heavy toll of American gun-related deaths (16,576 in 2124, excluding suicides).  “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel…  I think it’s worth it.  I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

 

Today, while speaking at Utah Valley University, Kirk was shot dead by an American citizen, using a gun, which it was his God-given right to own under the Second Amendment.  How tragically ironic and tragically American.

 

September 11th

UK prime minister Keir Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson from his job as British ambassador to the USA.  This was on account of Mandelson being an old friend of the late millionaire paedophile and human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.  Mandelson had even waxed lyrically about Epstein in writing: “Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life…  wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”

 

Five days later, another old friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who’d also, allegedly, waxed lyrically about him in writing (“We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.  Yes, we do, come to think of it.  Enigmas never age, have you noticed that…?”), arrived in Britain.  This was Donald Trump.  Starmer rolled out the red carpet and treated him to a state visit.

 

© Private Eye

 

September 13th

Led by double-barrelled far-right rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, failed thespian nepo-baby Laurence Fox and others, and addressed on a big screen by Sieg Heil-ing billionaire Elon Musk, a crowd of more than 100,000 people marched through London to protest against immigrants.  They were particularly against foreigners who were criminals and a danger to women being allowed into Britain.  According to reports, some protestors wore MAGA – Make America Great Again – hats in honour of Donald Trump: a foreigner who’s a convicted criminal, and a proven danger to women, who was being allowed into Britain for a state visit the following week.

 

September 16th

Donald Trump landed in Britain and his hosts immediately went into full pomp-and-ceremony grovelling mode.  The orange American president got a royal salute, a lunch with the Royal Family, a tour of the Royal Collection, a ‘beating retreat’ military ceremony, a ride in a gilded coach, a state banquet at Windsor Castle, and a visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for a look at the Winston Churchill archives and a press conference.

 

Speaking at the state banquet, Trump declared, “…this is truly one of the highest honours of my life. Such respect for you and such respect for your country…  The lionhearted people of this kingdom defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilization in the darkest days of fascism and communism.  The British gave the world the Magna Carta, the modern parliament and Francis Bacon’s scientific method.  They gave us the works of Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Burke, Newton and Blackstone.  The legal, intellectual, cultural and political traditions of this kingdom have been among the highest achievements of mankind.”

 

A week later, Trump gave a speech to the United Nations and had this to say about London, capital of Britain, and Western Europe, of which Britain is a part: “And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed.  Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that.  Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately…  I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

 

Maybe the grovelling hadn’t worked.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Executive Office of the President of the US

 

September 17th

American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), following comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.  These drew the ire of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  The FCC’s chair is Brendan Carr, a staunch Trump loyalist.  Trump applauded Carr as ‘a great American patriot’ for his actions.

 

Funnily enough, in 2022, Carr had declared: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech.  It challenges those in power while using humour to draw more into the discussion.  That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”  And Kirk himself once said of freedom of speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.”  But perhaps what they meant was political satire and outrageous things should only be expressed by people they agreed with.

 

September 22nd

After an uproar from practically everybody, and their granny, and their dog, the forces that’d removed Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves backtracked.  It was announced that he was being reinstated on ABC.  A new episode of his show was broadcast the following evening.  It achieved his highest ever ratings – 6.26 million viewers – and was viewed 26 million times on YouTube.  Kimmel quipped about Trump’s likely reaction: “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

 

In other words…  The American right, which earlier in the month had worked so hard to make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk, blaming his death on the ‘radical left’ and threatening retribution against anyone who suggested he might be anything less than a saint, had inadvertently made a martyr out of Jimmy Kimmel instead.

 

September 23rd

Trump delivered an hour-long speech to the United Nations.  Besides condemning the institution for a malfunctioning teleprompter and an escalator that stopped working – him and his missus Melania had to climb the stationary escalator, which for someone of his considerable acreage must have been hard work – and besides ranting about ‘radicalised environmentalists’ (“No more cows.  We don’t want cows anymore.  I guess they want to kill all the cows.”), he boasted that he’d ended seven wars: “…Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda…  Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

 

In fact, two of these wars didn’t exist, two have continued in terms of ceasefire violations and ongoing bloodshed, one was a war Trump helped to start and then participated in, one was a war where one of the countries denies that Trump had anything to do with settling it, and one ended with a peace-deal that hasn’t yet been ratified.

 

That last war, the one Trump actually came closest to ending, was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.  Previously, at the September 18th press conference with Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Albania and Azerbaijan.  And at a dinner in Vermont on September 20th, Trump announced that he’d ended a war between Armenia and Cambodia.  So maybe that’s why Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on a peace-deal.   One was so busy fighting Albania, and the other so busy fighting Cambodia, that they no longer had time to fight each other.

 

Come to think of it, none of this was ironic.  It was just moronic.

 

September 26th

The Ryder Cup, golf’s biennial contest between Europe and the USA, teed off at Bethpage State Park in New York State.  Trump attended its opening day, making him the first sitting American president to do so.  It’s fair to say that his attitude towards golf – win at all costs, even if it means getting caddies to plant new balls for you when the old ones land in inconvenient places – and his attitude towards competition generally – win at all costs, no matter what a bullying, graceless, ignorant chump it makes you look – infected the crowd.  Taking their cue from their Dear Leader, they behaved like bullying, graceless, ignorant chumps for the next couple of days.  They chanted “F*ck you Rory!” at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy.  They threw beer at McIlroy’s wife.  They hurled insults at McIlroy’s fellow Irish golfer Shane Lowry about his weight.  No wonder at one point McIlroy told them all to “Shut the f*ck up.”

 

Anyhow, Europe won the Ryder Cup by 15 to 13.  That wasn’t ironic either.  That was karma.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

Rab Foster resurfaces

 

© Cloaked Press Inc

 

The publishing house Cloaked Press, LLC has recently announced that its new anthology Fall into Fantasy 2025 can be purchased on Kindle.  Among the 15 stories contained in Fall into Fantasy 2025 is one entitled From Out the Boundless Deep, which I wrote under the name Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use for my fantasy fiction.

 

From Out the Boundless Deep has as its main character a woman called Kayra, who previously appeared in a story called The Trap Master, published away back in 2018 in the American webzine Aphelion.  The premise of both stories is that Kayra inhabits a world where all the creatures of myth and legend – griffins, hydras, harpies, kelpies, minotaurs, etc. – are real and she makes a living by hunting and trapping them.  In From Out the Boundless Deep, she’s summoned to a beach in a remote bay to deal with something that has unexpectedly surfaced there.  I suppose the story is partly inspired by J.G. Ballard’s haunting tale of magical realism The Drowned Giant (1964).  Though, like a lot of my Rab Foster stories, it owes a lot to the films of the legendary stop-motion-animation wizard Ray Harryhausen too.

 

To access the Kindle edition of Fall into Fantasy 2025, visit here.

Nostalgic wallows 5: Gerry Anderson

 

From gerryanderson.com / © Anderson Entertainment

 

This entry in my Nostalgic Wallows series of blogposts was inspired by something I learned recently.  Earlier this month, on September 4th, 50 years exactly had passed since the first broadcast of the first episode of the science-fiction TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).

 

Practically every week now, anniversaries of something or other pop up that serve as depressing reminders of how long ago my youth was and how long-in-the-tooth I’m getting.  But being reminded that the first time I watched Space: 1999 – and heard the opening chords of its urgent theme tune by composer Barry Gray, which went: “DUH…! DUH…! DUH-DUH…!” – was a whole half-century ago seemed to hit particularly hard.  Anyway, I guess this is an appropriate time to pay tribute to Gerry Anderson, who was responsible for Space: 1999 and was also, perhaps, the greatest producer of children’s shows in British TV history.

 

Gerry Anderson is, of course, remembered as ‘the puppet man’.  He and his wife Sylvia began making kids’ puppet TV shows such as The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-59) and Torchy the Battery Boy (1959) in the monochrome, still-austerity-affected 1950s.  Back then, every second children’s programme on British TV seemed to feature cheap-looking wooden figures jerking around in a jungle of marionette strings: Muffin the Mule (1946-55), Flower Pot Men (1952-53), The Woodentops (1955-56) and Pinky and Perky (1957).  What set the Andersons apart from their competitors, however, was their ambition.  Their audiences might have been children and their characters might have been puppets, but that didn’t mean their shows weren’t allowed to be spectacular.  Within a decade, the Andersons refined their puppetry to an art-form – they called their techniques ‘supermarionation’ and began each show with the proud declaration, Filmed in Supermarionation – and the result was Thunderbirds (1965-66).

 

The cast of Thunderbirds might’ve been marionettes, but in all other respects this show – about the adventures of International Rescue, a late-21st century organisation run by the heroic Tracy family who used their fabulous and futuristic vehicles and gadgets to save people from crashing airliners and burning skyscrapers – was like the James Bond movies tailored for children.  As well as gadgetry, explosions and skin-of-the-teeth escapes, it had a secret island hideaway (Tracy Island), an exotic villain (The Hood), a glamorous heroine (Lady Penelope) and a brash 1960s swagger, epitomised in Barry Gray’s strident theme music.  Children’s television had never seen the likes of this before.  No wonder Anderson’s boss at ITC Entertainment, the cigar-loving impresario Lord Lew Grade, informed Anderson after seeing the first rushes of Thunderbirds that he wasn’t making TV anymore, but feature films.  Grade knew showmanship when he saw it.

 

© Century 21 Television / Associated Television / United Artists

 

Another feature that Thunderbirds shared with the best Bond movies was that while it gave international audiences the spectacle they wanted, it retained a certain wry British-ness.  The Tracy family might’ve been Americans – indeed, voicing Anderson’s shows surely kept Britain’s small community of North American actors, like Ed Bishop and Shane Rimmer, in employment for years – but for British audiences the real stars of Thunderbirds were Lady Penelope and Parker, her butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce.

 

Lady Penelope and Parker represented opposite tiers of Britain’s class system.  She was a posh glamour-puss, he was a working-class Cockney and ex-convict.  Parker was loyal but sometimes downtrodden, though at least his employer tolerated his less socially acceptable talents, which included being light-fingered and knowing how to crack a safe.  Indeed, on occasion, Parker’s talents helped her to escape from a tight corner.  Lady Penelope was famously voiced by Sylvia Anderson and it’s significant that, following their divorce in the mid-1970s, Gerry Anderson claimed that among all his puppet characters Parker (“Yes, m’ lady”) was the one he identified with most.

 

Sure, Thunderbirds looks creaky when viewed today – what film or TV show from the 1960s doesn’t?  The special effects seem slightly dinky, the puppets’ heads are too big for them to be comfortably lifelike, and their manner of walking always elicits amusement.  Any drunkard having difficulty getting from the bar to the toilets in a British pub is invariably likened to a ‘Thunderbirds puppet’.  I can only testify that, as a kid, once each episode began with that famous countdown (“Five…  Four…  Three…  Two…  One!”), that famous catchphrase (“Thunderbirds are go!”) and that pulse-quickening theme music, even a real-life crashing airliner or burning skyscraper wouldn’t have diverted my attention from the television set.

 

Anderson also knew the value of merchandising tie-ins.  It wasn’t uncommon to find myself standing with my nose pressed against a toyshop window, wishing my pocket money was lavish enough to buy all the miniature Anderson spacecraft and air-and-land vehicles displayed in front of me – Thunderbirds 1, 2 and 3, plus items from other Anderson shows like the SPV vehicle, the Interceptors, the Mobiles, Skydiver and the Eagles.  The technicians who operated the models of those spacecraft and vehicles and brought them to life in Anderson’s shows, men like Derek Meddings and Brian Johnson, later became the backbone of Britain’s movie special-effects industry.  It was thanks to Anderson’s protégés that even after the indigenous British film industry died on its arse in the late 1970s, international studios at least kept coming to Britain to make movies like the Star Wars and Alien ones because of the technical expertise there.

 

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / ATV / ITC Entertainment

 

Along the way from The Adventures of Twizzle to Thunderbirds, the Andersons had made Supercar (1961-62), Fireball XL-5 (1962-63) and underwater extravaganza Stingray (1964-65).  Stingray is probably the second-best remembered of Anderson’s shows, partly because it was the first British children’s programme to be filmed in colour and partly because of its camp value.  It was never more camp than at the close of each episode, when the ballad Aqua Marina was sung in honour of the mute and enigmatic mermaid Marina, who helped out the Stingray crew in their battles against the despicable Aquaphibians, and on whom hero Captain Troy Tempest obviously had something of a crush.  However, it’s Anderson’s post-Thunderbirds show that I like best.

 

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) also served up spaceships, gadgets, explosions and general spectacle.  The tone was darker, however.  It had a high body-count – well, a high puppet body-count – and the Mars-based Mysterons whom Captain Scarlet and his gang fought off in every episode were, basically, terrorists.  Spookily, their habit of taunting the ‘Earthmen’ with messages threatening death and destruction seemed to prefigure Osama Bin Laden’s mode of operation decades later.  I suspect little Osama owned all the Gerry Anderson toys when he was a kid in Riyadh in the 1960s.

 

On the other hand, Joe 90 (1968-69) was a charming kids’ espionage show with a likeable juvenile hero.  It was just unfortunate that, on account of Joe’s oversized glasses, ‘Joe 90’ became the nickname of every bespectacled child in a British playground during the next few decades.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Century 21 Productions

 

In Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, the puppets had exact human proportions – Anderson’s puppet work had achieved perfection.  Accordingly, with nowhere else to go with puppetry, Anderson moved into live action.  His 1970 show UFO was basically a remake of Captain Scarlet with human actors.   Although UFO is fondly remembered for its kitsch notions of what future fashions would look like, such as Gabrielle Drake’s silver mini-skirt and outrageous purple bob, and although it tapped into every frustrated middle manager’s secret fantasy – Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) pretended to be a film producer, but at the touch of a button his office would descend a giant lift shaft into the huge underground headquarters of anti-alien defence force SHADO, of which he was the secret boss – the show was, like Captain Scarlet, pretty bleak.

 

The aliens who attacked the earth in UFO only did so because they wanted to harvest human organs, and there was frequently a high death-toll among the guest cast.  One episode, The Psychobombs, even had the aliens brainwashing a handful of ordinary human beings and turning them into superhuman suicide bombers to take out SHADO.  Elsewhere, the harrowing episode A Question of Priorities showed how Straker’s devotion to duty indirectly caused the death of his son.

 

For a little kid like me, the show was very scary at times.  For example, an episode called The Sound of Silence had a UFO concealed in the waters of a lake amid the bucolic English countryside and an alien stalking the surrounding woodland like a serial killer.  Even the whirring, pulsing sound that emanated from the UFOs while they were in flight was sinister.  Hilariously, Independent Television (ITV), which broadcast Anderson’s shows in the UK, assumed from his past record that UFO was a children’s series and broadcast repeats of it on weekday afternoons, when kids were arriving home from primary school.  That’s how I first saw UFO – I’d come home, switch on the TV and be traumatised by it.

 

From gerryanderson.com / © ITV Studios

 

By the mid-1970s Anderson was putting together Space: 1999, which at the time was the most expensive show in TV history.  It should have given him a franchise of Star Trek proportions and made him a fortune.  It didn’t, alas, and the show’s problems were mostly self-inflicted.  Though its special effects were the best yet – some compared them to the space scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – its scripts often strayed into the metaphysical and ended up muddled and impossible-to-understand.

 

Another issue was that its leads, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were unaccountably doleful and uninteresting.  That said, the supporting cast, consisting of Nick Tate, Prentis Hancock, Clifton Jones, Ziena Merton, Anton Philips and the excellent veteran character actor Barry Morse, were amiable.  (Sadly, Hancock and Jones died within a week of each other earlier this year.)  And the guest cast – which included Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Julian Glover, Anthony Valentine, Richard Johnson, Roy Dotrice, Ian McShane, Leo McKern and the loudest man on the planet, if not in the universe, Brian Blessed – was among the best ever featured in a TV series.

 

But Space: 1999’s worst problem was that, scientifically, it was rubbish.  Its premise was that a massive explosion on the moon’s surface in 1999 caused it to be blown out of the earth’s orbit, along with a moonbase and its 300-strong crew.  From there, the runaway satellite and its reluctant passengers careered across the galaxy, managing to encounter a new solar system, and an earth-like planet, and a usually unfriendly alien civilisation, in nearly every episode.  The scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov condemned the show for being preposterous, but even at ten years old I didn’t need Dr Asimov to tell me that.  I knew already that outer space was rather bigger than a fairground ride and a hurtling moon wasn’t going to encounter star-systems with habitable planets as frequently as dodgem cars bumping into one another.

 

Despite its faults – the pretentious claptrap, the dour leads, the scientific nonsensicality underpinning everything – there was something weirdly compelling about the first season of Space: 1999.  Daft and pompous though much of it was, it was at least unrepentantly so and it deserved kudos for serving up, occasionally, some of the trippiest moments ever seen on British TV.  And it sometimes scared the shit out of me, even more than UFO had.  See the episodes Force of Life, where, near the end, Ian McShane was gruesomely frazzled by a laser beam before coming back to life as a blackened, tattered zombie; or Death’s Other Dominion, which climaxed with Brian Blessed suddenly decaying into a revoltingly putrefied corpse.  Most terrifying, though, was Dragon’s Domain, where the moon blundered into a graveyard of derelict spaceships.  The graveyard was really a giant web, inhabited by a nightmarish spider – a shrieking, tentacled thing that swallowed its victims, drained them and spat them out again as lifeless, desiccated husks.

 

Unwisely, Anderson hired American producer Fred Freiberger to oversee Space: 1999’s second series.  Freiberger, who was known in American TV circles as ‘the Series Killer’ thanks to his habit of taking over shows shortly before they got cancelled – he produced the last and worst season of the original Star Trek (1966-69) – dumped the things that were good about Space 1999’s first season, including Barry Gray’s theme tune and poor old Barry Morse.  It turned into a tacky, embarrassing piece of juvenilia and was duly cancelled in 1977.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

 

After that, Anderson continued working but never quite captured the zeitgeist as he had in the 1960s.  Into Infinity was a 1976 special that was meant to launch another live-action science fiction series.  It had Brian Blessed, Nick Tate and Ed Bishop on board and was supposed to be based on proper astronomical knowledge of the universe – maybe Anderson was atoning for the scientific absurdities of Space 1999 – but it never got beyond the pilot stage.  In the 1980s he returned to making puppet shows and the result, Terrahawks (1983-86), was a fun but unoriginal rehash of his past glories.  Inevitably, ‘Zelda’, the intensely wrinkled villainess of Terrahawks, became another nickname in Britain, this time for ladies of a certain age who’d crumpled their skins by smoking too many cigarettes and spending too long on the sunbed.  In the 1990s he made the underwhelming live-action show Space Precinct (1994-95), while in 2005 a computer-generated version of Captain Scarlet failed to generate much interest, possibly because, at the time, it was lost amid the fuss made over the rebooting of another classic British science-fiction TV show, Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25).

 

During this period Anderson was financially as well as creatively unlucky.  He no longer held the rights to Thunderbirds when the BBC got around to rescreening it in the early 1990s.  Presumably, when yet another generation of British children went Thunderbirds-daft, and the country’s toyshops filled up again with Thunderbirds merchandising, he didn’t profit as much from it as he should have.  Similarly, Anderson was denied any participation when a live-action film version of Thunderbirds was made in 2004.  The resulting film was directed by an American (Jonathan Frakes) and was aimed only at young children – as opposed to older children and nostalgic adults.  It was, predictably, dreadful.

 

Hopefully, before his death in 2012, Anderson was at least aware of the great affection the British public had for him and his TV shows and of how his work was stamped on the DNA of modern popular culture.  For instance, you knew immediately what Nick Park was referencing in the opening scene of Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) when, accompanied by some rousing Barry Gray-type music, his titular heroes got to the seats of their pest-control van via a series of chutes, pulleys and lifts, just as the Tracy brothers had been transported to the cockpits of the International Rescue vehicles.  Even Wallace and Gromit’s garden gnomes parted before their van’s path like the palm trees on Tracy Island used to do when Thunderbird 2 rumbled into view.

 

And Team America – World Police, the scabrous 2004 puppet movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind South Park (1998-present), might have had as its heroes a bunch of gung-ho terrorist-blasting commandoes rather than the benign and upstanding Tracy family, and as its villain Kim Jong-Il rather than the Hood, but it was basically a grown-up version of Thunderbirds.  I just hope Gerry Anderson was able to see beyond the blood, vomit, swearing and graphic puppet-copulation scenes, get the joke and appreciate the love Parker and Stone obviously had for his work.

 

And I’ve just heard some news that also makes this post timely.  To mark the 60th anniversary of Thunderbirds, two of its 1965 episodes, Trapped in the Sky and Terror in New York City, have been remastered and released as a double-bill in British cinemas.  The Guardian review of them is here.

 

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / Associated Television

Street art in Little India

 

 

Little India straddles Serangoon Road in the Rochor area of central Singapore.  According to Google Maps, the neighbourhood begins at Bukit Timah Road to the south and extends west to Racecourse Road and east to Jalan Besar.  Northwards, it ends at Kinta Road west of Serangoon Road and at Hindoo Road east of it, though I’d say the South Asian vibe extends a fair bit above Hindoo Road – as far as Syed Alwi Road, after which the concrete malls, hotels and multistorey carparks take over.  In fact, the decorations currently hanging above Serangoon Road for 2025’s Deepavali – the Hindu festival of lights – extend north for many more blocks.

 

Back in colonial times, what is now Little India was once a district used by European cattle farmers and traders.  The presence of cattle created a demand for cattle-workers, and many of these workers came from India.  When the economic environment changed and the Europeans took their cattle elsewhere, the Indians remained and turned their hands to other trades.  Singapore recognized the district as a conservation area in 1989.

 

It’s a magnet for both tourists and shoppers.  The little shophouses lining Serangoon Road and its side-streets do a busy trade in souvenirs, jewelry, clothes, textiles, perfumes, phones, electrical appliances, homeware and kitchenware.  Lovers of tradition will appreciate the stalls where hands can be decorated with intricate henna art and the flower-shops festooned with flower-garlands for religious and other occasions.  And foodies will enjoy Little India’s many eateries – dishes and foodstuffs I’ve heard are particularly good there include biryani, chapati, chaat and fish-head curry.  Meanwhile, I was delighted to find down one side-street an establishment selling Indian beer for five dollars a pint, which, local beer-drinkers will tell you, is quite the bargain in Singapore.

 

But the thing I like best about Little India is how, where there’s an expanse of wall looking onto a street, an artist has frequently used it as a canvas and painted something.  These pieces of street-art might be big, bold murals covering the entire side of a building or something on a smaller, more intimate scale.

 

Often, the subjects of the art are the businesses that operate, or used to operate, in Little India.  These include merchants, tailors and the tiffin men who traditionally used their carts, loaded with metal containers, to deliver meals to and snacks to workers in the middle of shifts – they were the food-delivery folk of their day.

 

 

Meanwhile, Lembu Square has artwork depicting a whole street-front of facades, including a school, some of its pupils and one staff-member.  For a moment, I thought the bicycles were part of the picture – then I realised they’d just been propped there.

 

 

Other works lean away from the everyday world of work and commerce and instead celebrate nature or traditional Indian culture.

 

 

Finally, this building-side in Lembu Square doesn’t contain any artwork.  However, with its haphazard patchwork of colours, and its configurations of bins, doors, grills and aircon condenser units, it looked artistic to me.

 

Farewell to the king

 

© Penguin Books

 

I’ve just finished Excalibur (1997), the third and final book in the Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell’s take on the King Arthur legend.  Reading it was a bittersweet experience.  On one hand, I was pleased it lived up to the high standards set by its predecessors in the trilogy, The Winter King (1995) and Enemy of God (1996).  On the other, I felt almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.

 

Still, not wanting to read the final book in the trilogy because you don’t want bad things to happen to its characters – that must show how captivating Cornwell’s Warlord books are.  And besides, as they say, all good things come to an end.

 

Once again, the story is narrated by Derfel, an elderly, one-handed Christian monk. He’s writing down – with his remaining hand, obviously – the details of Arthur’s life as it unfolded in post-Roman, fifth-and-sixth-century Britain, a time when the island and its Briton inhabitants were besieged by invading, land-hungry Saxons.  Derfel knows these details because despite being Christian and monkish now, he was in his youth (and, in Excalibur, his middle age) a pagan and one of Arthur’s warlords.  He’s recording the story at the request of Queen Igraine, who’s too young to have known Arthur but is besotted with his legend.  Derfel unhappily suspects that, when he’s finished, the queen will change the unromantic bits of his saga to make it more legend-friendly.  “Tales of men fighting can get very boring after a while,” she scolds the old monk, “and a love story makes it all a lot more interesting.”

 

Excalibur joins the dots and tells us how Derfel went from being a powerful pagan warrior to being a humble Christian monk in a monastery run by the contemptible Bishop Sansum – a recurring character in the trilogy, who constantly schemed and shit-stirred against Arthur and, in his furtive, cowardly way, tried to engineer his downfall.  We also learn how Derfel lost his hand.  And, all credit to Cornwell’s ingenious storyline, he certainly doesn’t lose it in any way I’d expected.

 

And we find out the fates of the characters who were still standing at the end of the second book.  We learn what happened to the wily and enigmatic druid Merlin; to King Cuneglas of Powys whom, alone among Britain’s powerful kings, Arthur could depend upon as an ally; and to Derfel’s fellow warriors, such as the Christian Galahad, and the Numidian Sagramor, and the coarse but likable Culhwch.  Also, with an ache, Derfel recalls what became of his partner Ceinwyn.  In this final volume, she has to endure a lot.

 

Of course, we get the final chapters in the life of Arthur himself.  At one point, Derfel sums up the thanklessness of Arthur’s task: “If only Arthur had remained in power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just grumbled about him.  When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained because it was not enough.  The Christians attacked him for favouring the pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings… were jealous of him…  Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down.  Britain let itself down.  Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled among itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault.  Arthur, who had given them victory!”

 

From wikimedia.org

 

No wonder that in Excalibur, after Arthur manages to beat off the Saxons, he retires from his role as the Lord Protector of the kingdom of Dumnonia and becomes ‘a mere landowner living in the peaceful countryside with no worries other than the health of his livestock and the state of his crops…’  He also, amusingly, tries to learn how to be a blacksmith, but he’s not very good at it.  When Derfel sees him working on ‘a shapeless piece of iron that he claimed was a shoe-plate for one of his horses’, it’s clear the iron is a metaphor for his futile attempts to fashion a unified and harmonious Britain out of its quarrelling kingdoms.

 

At the same time, the book provides endings for the remaining villains of the trilogy.  These include Arthur’s treacherous wife Guinevere, who at the end of the Enemy of God had joined forces with the dastardly Lancelot – the young Queen Igraine was dismayed to learn from Derfel that Guinevere and Lancelot were definitely not the noble characters of legend.  There’s also Arthur’s cruel and potentially despotic nephew Mordred whom, despite everyone’s misgivings, Arthur feels honour-bound to give the throne of Dumnonia to when Mordred reaches manhood, thanks to an oath sworn to Mordred’s grandfather Uther Pendragon.  There are the Saxon kings Aelle and Cerdic, whose forces are rapidly encroaching on the Britons’ western strongholds.  And perhaps most fearsome of all, there’s the priestess Nimue, once a childhood friend of Derfel and a protegee of Merlin, who in Excalibur’s final pages has transformed into the leader of a fanatical pagan force that’s as much of a threat to the heroes as Mordred and the Saxons.

 

Like all good writers, though, Cornwell doesn’t paint his characters as being simply good or evil.  They’re often nuanced.  Indeed, in Excalibur, a few people we’d written off as bad guys – or bad girls – achieve some redemption for themselves.

 

While the cast of Excalibur is mostly familiar from the previous two books, we get a couple of new characters too.  We’re introduced to the mystical bard Taliesin, who is something of a surrogate figure for Merlin – Merlin is absent from much of the book and it’s only near the end that we discover the tragic reason why.  Taliesin professes to be merely an observer, someone who records and later tells the stories that happen to other people.  At one point he informs Derfel, “It does not matter to me, Lord, whether you live or die for I am the singer and you are my song…”  Yet he becomes proactive and saves the day on one important occasion.  A less welcome surrogate is Argante, a young pagan princess Arthur marries as a replacement for the disgraced Guinevere.  He has no interest in her but feels, lamely, that ‘a man should be married’.  Arthur’s lack of enthusiasm is soon reciprocated by the ambitious but bitter Argante, and she throws her lot in with Mordred.

 

Cornwell also drops Sir Gawain into the mix, as he did with Tristan and Isolde in Enemy of God, though Gawain’s appearance is even briefer than theirs was and it ends no more happily.  Here, poor Gawain certainly doesn’t get to meet a Green Knight and go off on a quest of his own.

 

From wikipedia.org / oldbookart.com

 

The plot of Enemy of God hinged around three events and, similarly, that of Excalibur can be divided into three main episodes.  Firstly, Merlin and Nimue attempt to summon back the old pagan gods and restore Britain to its former greatness.  This involves using the 13 ‘Treasures of Britain’ that they spent the previous two books retrieving – the Treasures include Arthur’s sword Excalibur – in an elaborate ceremony.  It also involves setting the summit of a hill called Mai Dun spectacularly on fire at Samain, the pagan predecessor to Halloween.  Secondly, the Britons engage in a long, desperate struggle against Aelle and Cerdic, whose allied forces have launched an assault on Dumnonia.  And lastly, there’s the final reckoning with the armies of Mordred and Nimue.  Mordred is intent on killing Arthur and his young son Gwydre, who has a claim on Dumnonia’s throne.  Nimue is intent on reclaiming Excalibur as a Treasure of Britain and making another attempt to bring back the ancient gods.

 

Enemy of God painted Christianity in a negative light – it concluded with a bloody revolt against Arthur by the Christians of Dumnonia, which Lancelot had fomented.  But in Excalibur the pagans come off badly too.  The ceremony that Merlin conducts on Mai Dun to summon the gods reveals a dark and hitherto-unseen side to his nature.  And by the book’s end, Nimue, who early in the trilogy had been portrayed as a heroine and even as a possible love-interest for Derfel, has degenerated into a crazed and bloodthirsty monster.

 

Regarding the magical powers that Merlin, Nimue, the other druids and the Saxons’ wizards claim to have, Cornwell continues the policy he established in the first two books – he keeps it ambiguous.  The people of the time certainly believe in it.  Magic is as much a part of life for them as warfare, court intrigue and the weather.  Modern-day readers are allowed to read between the lines and interpret some of that magic as fakery – its practitioners have no qualms about resorting to crafty conjuring tricks.  The rest of it can be attributed to coincidence.  However, in Excalibur, you’re forced to explain a lot of allegedly magic-inspired happenings – dream-prophecies, curses, enchantments – as coincidences.  You begin to wonder if, in the world Cornwell has created here, there might be substance in what Merlin and Nimue claim they can do.

 

Elsewhere, Cornwell’s description of fifth-and-sixth-century fighting is as gripping as ever.  It’s maybe even more gripping than in Excalibur’s two predecessors.  The central episode, wherein we get a Saxon invasion, a desperate flight and then a siege, and finally the Battle of Mynydd Baddon and its aftermath, lasts a good 140 pages and is enthralling from start to finish.  The climactic Battle of Camlann is on a much smaller scale but, because you know it’s Arthur’s last stand, it feels no less intense.

 

And despite the sadness that increasingly permeates the book, things are still leavened by humour.  Merlin, as ever, gets the wittiest lines.  Early on, he says about Arthur: “…he is a halfwit.  Think about it!  Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere alive!  If a soul wants to live forever in this world it seems like a very good idea to become an enemy of Arthur.”

 

So, that’s Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy over for me.  At least I can console myself with the thought that there’s plenty of books by him I’ve still to read: two dozen Sharpe novels (1981-2025); the Grail Quest quartet (2000-2012), which sounds Arthurian but actually takes place during the Hundred Years’ War; 13 instalments of the Saxon Stories (2004-2020), set in ninth-and-tenth-century England; and four instalments of the Starbuck series (1993-96), set during the American Civil War.  Yes, there’s enough Cornwell goodness out there to keep me reading for a long time to come.

 

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell