Father Ted – Blood and Porridge

April 23, 2025April 23, 2025

Happy belated birthday, Patrick

© Pan Macmillan

A month ago, I planned to post something on this blog in honour of the great Irish writer Patrick McCabe, who celebrated his 70^th birthday on March 27th. Somehow, though, I forgot all about it and the Happy-Birthday-Patrick post didn’t appear. I must have been distracted by something else near the end of March – probably the latest atrocity or lunacy perpetrated by Donald Trump’s administration in the USA. I can’t remember what. The atrocities and lunacies have come thick and fast since the Orange Jobby’s inauguration as the 47^th American president and it’s impossible to keep track of them.

Anyway, here’s that post now. Be warned that it contains many spoilers for McCabe’s books.

Patrick McCabe hails from the town of Clones (pronounced ‘klo-nis’, not as in the 2002 Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones) in County Monaghan, just over the border from Northern Ireland. Clones is famous as the birthplace of boxer Barry McGuigan, known during his pugilistic career as ‘the Clones Cyclone’, though I suspect McCabe was more intrigued by the exploits of another famous, or infamous, native of the town, Alexander Pearce, the convict, serial escapee and alleged cannibal who was hung in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1824.

Clones and the surrounding countryside are obviously influential on McCabe’s writing and that explains some of the affinity I feel for it – Clones is only a 35-minute drive from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, where I was born and went to school. Though Clones is in the Irish Republic and Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and as a result the political and cultural vibes aren’t quite the same, there’s nonetheless much in his books I can relate to: how his characters think, behave and speak and how they deal with, or fail to deal with, the frustrations and absurdities that their environment assails them with.

Also, McCabe’s books can be very funny and very dark, frequently at the same time. If there’s anything I find irresistible, it’s the combination of humour and darkness, done well.

The most famous of McCabe’s books is 1992’s The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times’ Irish Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Like Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), it made such a splash that it both overshadowed his other works and became the measuring stick against which they were all compared. However, while Lanark and Trainspotting were Gray and Welsh’s first published books, The Butcher Boy was McCabe’s fourth. It followed the children’s book The Adventures of Shay Mouse (1985) and the novels Music on Clinton Street (1987) and Carn (1989). That last book is set in a small Irish town, the Carn of the title, that’s clearly a fictional stand-in for Clones and it’s the only one of his early works that I’ve read.

© Picador Books

Actually, I read Carn after I’d read The Butcher Boy, and for a long time I thought it was published after The Butcher Boy too. Maybe Carn feels like a subsequent book because The Butcher Boy is set in the early 1960s, while Carn’s plot spans the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Amusingly, late on, McCabe describes how the townsfolk of Carn have become addicted to the brash American TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91) and are talking about J.R. Ewing and co. as if they’re real people.

Carn tells the tale both of two women, Sadie and Josie, who are trapped in the town in different ways – one drudges in the local meat-packing factory, the other is an outcast who returns after a long exile – and of the town itself, experiencing economic growth in the 1960s, witnessing nearby Northern Ireland going insane in the 1970s, and suffering economic decline in the 1980s. At one point, Josie reflects on the changes, on how “a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.” Carn isn’t McCabe’s best work, but its blend of sadness, tenderness, bleakness and humour makes it an interesting blueprint for what was to follow.

The Butcher Boy is a more claustrophobic read than Carn because we’re stuck inside the head of its main character, psychotic youngster Francie Brady. Told by Francie in the first person, we quickly realise he’s an unreliable narrator. Indeed, the opening line spells it out: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.” This isn’t unreliable narration in the style of Kazuo Ishiguro where it gradually dawns on you that the reality isn’t quite as it’s being presented. It’s unreliable narration where you know fine well the vile and cruel things that are really going on, despite Francie’s deluded blathering, and you read on with (metaphorically) your fingers over your eyes, waiting for the excruciating moment when the penny finally drops.

This happens several times. Francie’s friendship with a comparatively normal lad called Joe Purcell clearly frays much more quickly than Francie thinks it does. Francie clings to the belief they’re best buddies even when it’s obvious Joe is repelled by the sight of him. Also, after the deaths of his parents, Francie becomes obsessed with a story he’d heard from his father, Benny, about their honeymoon in the seaside town of Bundoran. As Benny told it, he and Francie’s mother were young, beautiful and blissfully in love. We just know from what we’ve seen of Benny, a drunken brute of a man, that the reality was horribly different. Francie, though, believes in the ideal until he finally goes asking questions at the Bundoran boarding house his parents stayed in. Only then does he realise the hideous truth.

© Picador Books

Worst of all is an earlier episode where Francie calms down for a while, works in the local abattoir and lives at home with Benny, who’s – supposedly – still alive at the time. But Benny is oddly subdued and it’s evident to the reader that he’s died of alcoholism and is slowly decomposing into the sofa. Francie, in his madness, doesn’t twig on until several months later when the police come calling.

Incidentally… No disrespect to Patrick McCabe, but I have a wee quibble about the book’s continuity. Francie mentions watching that hoary old American sci-fi TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which was produced by Irwin Allen and ran from 1964 to 1968. But the book’s later action takes place against the potentially-apocalyptic background of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in 1962, two years before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea debuted on television. Maybe McCabe was thinking of the movie that inspired the TV show, released in 1961?

In 1997, The Butcher Boy was filmed by Neil Jordan, a writer-director who with movies like Angel (1982), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) has a knack similar to McCabe’s for taking the dreary and mundane and creating something out-of-the-ordinary with it. Though with Jordan, what’s created is closer to magical realism. With McCabe, it’s gothic. The film follows the book fairly faithfully, with a few small embellishments – I liked Sinead O’Connor cameoing as the Virgin Mary. However, just by being a film, it’s a less suffocating experience, as we’re seeing events as bystanders, not inside from the cockpit of Francie’s head. Incidentally, McCabe appears among the cast playing the town drunk, Jimmy the Skite.

© Picador Books

I’ve read claims that Francie’s mental unravelling is meant to symbolise Ireland’s fragile and precarious sense of identity, moving from colonial status to independence and having to navigate such momentous events as the permissive swinging 1960s and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But to me McCabe’s next book, The Dead School (1995), is more obviously about that. It pits Old Ireland – represented by Raphael Bell, the pious, patriotic and upstanding master of a boys’ boarding school – against Young Ireland – represented by Malachy Dudgeon, a product of a dysfunctional family and a member of a younger, less conservative and more fun-loving generation than Raphael’s. Malachy becomes a teacher and ends up working at Raphael’s school, with disastrous consequences for both of them. Later, when their paths cross again, things are even worse – one is mad, the other an alcoholic. The Dead School describes a collision of two different eras, and two antagonistic Irish mindsets, and the result is as unpretty as The Butcher Boy.

After the darkness of those two books, I was ready for Breakfast on Pluto (1998), which also made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist. This recounts the early-1970s adventures of Patrick ‘Pussy’ Brady, described in contemporary reviews as a ‘gay transvestite’ though now I suppose she’d be called a transwoman. Pussy leaves her Irish hometown and heads to London in search of her biological mother, who’d abandoned her when she was a baby. Overshadowing everything are the Troubles that have recently bloodily erupted in Northern Ireland and are making their presence felt in London too, thanks to bombing campaigns by the IRA. With Irish terrorist violence on the menu, Breakfast on Pluto may not sound a barrel of laughs, but I found it hilarious thanks to Pussy’s droll way of describing things. I also found it curiously uplifting. Despite having many indignities inflicted upon her, Pussy is a trooper who keeps on going.

Breakfast on Pluto was filmed in 2005, again courtesy of Neil Jordan. The movie version is a bit too long and episodic, but it’s mightily enjoyable and has a lighter, breezier feel than the book. Cillian ‘Oppenheimer’ Murphy plays the main character, whose name is changed from ‘Pussy’ to the less provocative ‘Kitten’. This is one of several alterations Jordan makes. Kitten’s first lover – whom McCabe depicted as a crooked Irish politician in the mould of Charles Haughey – becomes a singer in a rock band, played by Gavin Friday, real-life singer of the Virgin Prunes. And generally, Jordan glams things up with some pleasantly nostalgic references to early-1970s popular culture. For instance, the film features both Wombles and Daleks, which I don’t recall being in the original. McCabe has a cameo in this too, playing a schoolteacher who freaks out when the young Kitten asks him for advice on how to have a sex change. Sadly, though, Breakfast on Pluto is one of Jordan’s more underrated and neglected films.

© Picador Books

A year after Breakfast on Pluto, McCabe published a short-story collection, Mondo Desperado. The stories’ titles, like My Friend Bruce Lee, I Ordained the Devil and The Boils of Thomas Gully, tell you what to expect – more of that inimitable McCabe cocktail of the humdrum, absurd, grotesque, macabre and howlingly funny. Deserving special mention is the opening story, Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge, which memorably begins: “It’s hard to figure out how in a small town like this a mature woman of twenty-eight years could get herself mixed up with a bunch of deadbeat swingers, but that is exactly what happened to Cora Bunyan and I should know because she was my wife.”

After that, I lost track of McCabe’s books for a while. To date, there’s been seven more I haven’t read: Emerald Gems of Ireland (2001), Call Me the Breeze (2003), Winterwood (2006) – which Irvine Welsh reviewed admiringly in the Guardian – The Holy City (2009), Hello and Goodbye (2013), The Big Yaroo (2019) and Poguemahone (2022). A few years back, however, I did read his 2010 novel The Stray Sod Country, which I thought was wonderful. It features another of McCabe’s exquisitely-drawn Irish small towns. This time, the action takes place mostly in the late 1950s, around the time of the launch of Sputnik 2 in 1957 and the Munich air disaster in 1958 – though there are jumps forward in time to add perspective to the 1950s-set plot.

The Stray Sod Country has an omniscient and sinister narrator. This, we learn, is a malevolent supernatural being called a fetch, which has a dismaying fondness for entering the minds of humans, corrupting them and encouraging them to do harm to others. Sneakily, the fetch foments and escalates feuds between the townspeople. Thus, for example, a rivalry, then hatred, develops between Golly Murray, wife of the town’s barber, and Blossom Foster, wife of its bank manager. Meanwhile, in a fit of priestly jealousy worthy of Father Ted (1995-98), local cleric Father Hand fulminates against his old rival Father Peyton, ‘the infuriatingly smug Mayo toady’, now a ‘celebrity priest of Hollywood, America’ who associates with Frank Sinatra. But he’d be better advised to worry about a disgraced schoolteacher called James A. Reilly. Father Hand had him run out of town for kissing a male pupil. Reilly is living as a vagrant in the nearby bog, nursing his wrath whilst in possession of an Enfield rifle from the Irish Civil War, and he’s fertile ground for the fetch.

I felt McCabe portrayed the cast of small-town eccentrics populating The Stray Sod Country with more affection than usual. And he seemed to have a genuine love for the time and place depicted. Perhaps the great man was mellowing with age?

So, I wish Patrick McCabe all the best as he enters his eighth decade. Barry McGuigan may be the Clones Cyclone, but in literary terms McCabe is the Clones Hurricane – a hurricane of the homespun, the hideous and the hilarious.

© Bloomsbury Publishing

November 13, 2024November 14, 2024

Thom is da bomb

I don’t know when I became a fan of the band Radiohead. They seemed to creep up on me by stealth. I’d been aware of them for years before suddenly, one day, I realised: “Hey! I really like them!”

Appropriately for a band who crept up on me, the first song by them I heard was Creep from their debut album Pablo Honey (1993). Though a massive hit, I didn’t actually like Creep, finding it dull and plodding. My disdain for it was shared by Radiohead themselves, with guitarist Ed O’Brien saying of their performances of the song during the early 1990s: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.”

At this time I worked as a university lecturer in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo. One day in 1995 I received a gift from a cool indie-kid in one of my classes, Yoko Koyama, who’d discovered that despite my outward veneer of grumpiness and grouchiness I was, underneath, a sensitive soul who was heavily into music. The gift was a cassette recording of Radiohead’s newly-released second album, The Bends. I diplomatically accepted it, not expecting to like it much on the basis that I hadn’t been impressed by Creep. But when I listened to it, I thought, “This is actually pretty good.” Not brilliantly good, but definitely good.

Around then, Radiohead visited Sapporo and played a gig, but the night of their concert was one when I had to teach a couple of evening classes at the university. So I missed the chance to see them. The next day, I went into one of my regular Sapporo drinking hangouts, the Beifu-tei Bar, and got talking to a mate of mine, a Scotsman from St Andrews called Stevie Malcolm. Stevie informed me, “Aye, thon English rock band were in here last night after their gig. What dae ye call them? Thingmie-heid.”

“You mean, Radiohead?”

“Aye, Radio-heid!”

I got the impression Stevie had chatted away to Radiohead barely knowing who they were. Though from the band’s unconventional approach to the music industry and their discomfort with the trappings of superstardom, they probably liked chatting to strangers in bars with barely any idea of who they were.

In 1997 Radiohead released their third album OK Computer, which even my snobbiest, most purist music-loving friends, who’d dismissed Pablo Honey and The Bends with a contemptuous flick of the hand, had to admit was an awesome record. It still figures prominently when music publications list the best rock albums of all time and retrospective reviews frequently award it a full five stars. And though subsequent albums – Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), Hail to the Thief (2003), In Rainbows (2007), The King of Limbs (2011) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) – never created quite the same stir, and often made demands on the listener by veering off into the avantgarde, experimental and left-field, I’ve found all of them laudable.

It helped that, unlike other bands who at various times were massively loved by audiences and hailed by critics as world-straddling musical colossi, Radiohead never seemed in your face that much. So you didn’t grow sick of them. Whereas for a few years U2 or Oasis, or even REM, seemed to be everywhere in the media, with the result that their ubiquity led to a backlash – the public losing interest, the critics getting disenchanted, familiarity generally breeding contempt – Radiohead were more subtle, less intrusive and lower profile. Perhaps their credibility endured because of that.

Even their appearances in popular culture tended to be wry and quirky and happened in unexpected, and cool, places. For example, I remember the very last episode of Father Ted (1995-98) when the suicidal priest Father Kevin (Tommy Tiernan) gets cured of his depression by Ted playing to him Isaac Hayes’ joyous Theme from Shaft (1971) – only to lapse back into suicidal depression when he hears Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film) (1997) playing on the radio in a bus. Or when they turned up in a 2001 episode of South Park called Scott Tenorman Must Die and added a final layer of torment to the unfortunate Scott Tenorman of the title. Scott is a kid who’s been tricked by Eric Cartman into eating the minced bodies of his dead parents. When he discovers what he’s done, he understandably bursts into tears. Just then, his favourite band, Radiohead, happen to stroll past, see him and cruelly mock him for being a ‘cry-baby’.

From x.com / © Hat Trick Productions

© South Park Studios

Anyway, last week on November 5^th, Radiohead’s vocalist and main songwriter Thom Yorke rolled up here in Singapore to play a solo concert as part of his Everything tour. Yorke has a long history of making music on his own, from his 2006 album The Eraser, through 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, to 2019’s ANIMA, and he’s also been involved in a couple of side-bands like Atoms for Peace and The Smile, so it’s not a surprise to find him performing without the rest of Radiohead. I attended the gig accompanied by my better half, Mrs Blood and Porridge, who wouldn’t have missed this occasion for the world. She’s such a dyed-in-the-wool Radiohead fan that the other day she even made our cat watch the video for 2016’s Burn the Witch on YouTube.

Yorke played at the Star Theatre, which I’ve visited a couple of times in the past. At previous gigs there, I was not greatly impressed by the crowd, many of whom seemed more interested in filming the event on their phones than getting into the excitement and vibe of the music itself. As I wrote a while ago about a Deep Purple concert: “Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen…? It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage… Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.” But tonight’s audience, Singaporeans and foreigners alike, seemed to be genuine Radiohead fans and Thom Yorke-lovers who knew the great man wasn’t going to appreciate having a thousand phones pointed at him by a thousand glaikit dimwits. So, thankfully, phone-usage was at a minimum.

It wasn’t the most physical of performances. Yorke spent most of his time on a patch of stage encircled by musical equipment, including several keyboards, and looked like a cross between Rick Wakeman of Yes and Captain Nemo tinkling out Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on his organ. He did, occasionally, venture towards the audience to play guitar or indulge in some shuffling dancing. The latter drew affectionate cheers. I have to say seeing Thom make his funky moves brought a smile to my face, as it seemed to prove there was at least one person on the planet whose dancing is even worse than mine is.

But what of the music? I’d read a worrying review of a gig from earlier in the tour, in Sydney, where the writer observed, “Each Radiohead song that’s played – they make up just under half the setlist – is met with a hushed reverence, while loud chatter is heard every time something else gets an airing.” Maybe that means modern-day Sydney concertgoers are disrespectful bozos, for that certainly wasn’t my impression of the Singapore crowd. Yes, the ten Radiohead numbers he played during the set – coming from a range of the band’s albums, though nothing featured from Pablo Honey, Hail to the Thief or The King of Limbs – were enthusiastically received. But the audience showed their appreciation of the non-Radiohead stuff as well. This included material from all three of Yorke’s solo albums, two new songs (Back in the Game and Hearing Damage), and two he’d composed for the 2018 soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the Dario Argento 1977 horror classic Suspiria.

It all meshed together nicely. The solo material evoked at different times the sounds of the Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails and I even wondered if Yorke was getting a bit disco-y at one or two points. Naturally, electronica-rooted Radiohead numbers like Idioteque, Everything in its Right Place or Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (off Kid A) slotted in seamlessly among that lot. Surprisingly, though, the band’s more conventional – dare I say more tuneful – songs, like How to Disappear Completely (Kid A again) Fake Plastic Trees (off The Bends), and All I Need (off In Rainbows) fitted in smoothly too, making it an impressively cohesive set. Maybe it was because Yorke’s falsetto – often mocked, but inimitable, haunting and gorgeous – provided the aural thread that stitched together all these disparate pieces of musical cloth.

Praise is due too for the accompanying light show, with several tall screens treating the audience to dazzling and dizzying displays that, during the evening, seemed to range from daubs of luminous green graffiti to blizzards of multicoloured confetti, from drizzles of Matrix-style code to what looked like, frankly, masses of glowing spaghetti. Occasionally, these gave way to stark white light, and darkness, where, at his consoles, Yorke looked like a torturer operating his torture-machines in a gothic dungeon. Occasionally too, the chaotic patterns coalesced into the ghostly features of the man himself. Thus, the show was an impressively visual as well as aural experience. I have to say it was easier on the eyes than the screens at the previous gig I’d been to at the Star Theatre, which’d subjected me to regular, unflinching close-ups of the 78-year-old visage of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.

By the concert’s end it seemed the many diehard fans in the crowd had got their money’s worth. Their frequent cries of “I love you, Thom!” had never lessened in enthusiasm while the 22-song set wound on. And presumably the guy who shouted, before the gig and behind us on the escalator while we rode up to the theatre’s entrance, “Please, Thom, don’t play Creep tonight!”, went home happy too.

A good evening, then. It certainly took our minds off the horror that was happening elsewhere on November 5^th.

August 19, 2024August 22, 2024

God save the queen

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

I see a new Alien movie has just been released. Entitled Alien: Romulus and directed by Fede Alvarez, it’s had variable reviews – for instance, Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars in the Guardian, Kim Newman gave it three stars in Sci-fi Now and John Nugent gave it four stars in Empire. My tastes generally align with Newman’s, so I suspect if I go to see it, I’ll find Alien: Romulus a middling cinematic experience. I suspect too the critics reacting most positively to the film are secretly doing so out of relief that co-producer Ridley Scott didn’t insist on it having Michael Fassbender play a certain, cocky android spouting tediously about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Anyway, this gives me an excuse to reprint something I once wrote about James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), the second entry in the series. Film fans will probably spend the rest of time arguing about whether it or Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is the best Alien movie of all, but Aliens is probably my favourite. That may be because I first saw it in a more conducive environment – a packed cinema in Aberdeen shortly after its release, where the audience initially didn’t know what to expect but certainly showed their appreciation when the thrills started coming. (Whereas I first saw Scott’s Alien at a gathering of my high school’s film club, where the building tension was seriously interrupted by a ten-minute break when a teacher had to change the reels on the projector, and I watched the movie surrounded by loudmouth, smartass, wanker-teenager schoolmates.)

Here, then, is my paean to Aliens… With some bonus Father Ted.

© Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

Scene: The living room of the Parochial House on Craggy Island during a 1996 episode of Father Ted. The elderly and infirm Bishop Jordan, one of a visiting trio of church dignitaries, has just been explaining how he had a heart attack last year and needs to avoid having sudden surprises and shocks.

Father Dougal (bellowing at the top of his voice): AAAAAHHHHH!

Bishop Jordan almost suffers a heart attack on the living room sofa.

Father Ted (seeing Bishop Jordan’s distress): Dougal! What are you doing?!

Father Dougal: Sorry, Ted – I just remembered Aliens is on after the news!

Father Ted: Dougal, for God’s sake! (To the stricken Bishop Jordan, who has almost collapsed off the sofa.) I’m sorry, Bishop Jordan! (To Dougal.) Did you not hear what he’s saying about his heart?

Father Dougal: I know, but it’s just that it’s the Director’s Cut! Come on everyone, let’s all have a lads’ night in!

Father Ted: Dougal, just shut up! (To Bishop Jordan.) Ha-ha. A heart attack? That’s rare enough these days.

Bishop O’Neill (trying to help Father Jordan back onto the sofa): There were certainly a lot of prayers said for Bishop Jordan –

Father Dougal: I don’t know why we can’t look at Aliens –

Father Ted: Dougal! Bishop O’Neill is speaking.

Father Dougal: But… They’d love it, Ted!

Father Ted: No, they wouldn’t!

Father Dougal: But bishops love sci-fi –

Father Ted: DOUGAL! WE ARE NOT WATCHING ALIENS!

Like Dougal in that old episode of Father Ted, I still get irrationally excited when I discover that James Cameron’s Aliens is about to get another airing on TV. And during the first occasion I watched it, there were a few moments when, like the beleaguered Bishop Jordan, I thought my heart was about to pop. Yes, Aliens is a film that gets the adrenalin sluicing through you like almost no other.

It’s remarkable that the film achieves this when it’s a sequel. One of the Great Laws of the Cinema is that, compared to the original films, sequels are almost always rubbish. Certainly, that law seemed to hold true in the 1980s, when cinema audiences were subjected to such puddings as Halloween II (1981), Grease 2 (1982), Rocky III (1982) and IV (1985), Jaws 3-D (1983), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Beverley Hills Cop II (1987). Oh, and Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), which was directed by a certain James Cameron…

Aliens’ task was particularly daunting. It was to be the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s magnificent haunted-house-in-space movie, 1979’s Alien.

It’s unsurprising that while Cameron was shooting the sequel at Buckinghamshire’s Pinewood Studios in the mid-1980s, he had to put up with a sceptical British crew who were of the opinion that this bearded early-thirty-something Canadian wasn’t fit to lick the boots of the mighty Ridley. Mind you, the contempt was reciprocated by Cameron. A man used to pursuing his vision with the single-minded ruthlessness of The Terminator (1984) – the film that he’d directed between the Piranha sequel and the Alien sequel – Cameron was not impressed by the crew’s Great British working practices like stopping every couple of minutes to have a tea-break.

The resulting movie shows no disrespect to Ridley Scott or the original Alien. It simply takes a very different approach to the hideous, slimy, fanged, multi-jawed, acid-blooded title creatures. Whereas Alien sets one of them loose in a giant spaceship and Scott milked the scenario for all the clammy, claustrophobic horror it was worth, Cameron unleashes a whole army of them in and around a base on a distant planet and declares out-and-out war on the bastards, courtesy of a well-armed platoon of space marines who’ve journeyed there in the company of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, heroine and sole survivor of the first film. Yes, there’s clamminess, claustrophobia and horror to be found in Cameron’s vision too, but that doesn’t prevent Aliens from also being one of the best action films ever made.

That’s not to say that Aliens is a non-stop rollercoaster from start to finish. Cameron actually takes his time getting his characters to the base (after contact with the 160-strong space colony there is suddenly and mysteriously lost). Wisely, and unlike a lot of directors of scary movies who’ve come since, he gives the audience a chance to get to know, and get to like, his characters. So that when hell does break loose, halfway through the film, we’re genuinely on the edge of our seats because we’re rooting for those characters to survive.

Cameron does such a good job of it that, 38 years on, I still know those characters like they’re dear old friends. There’s Michael Biehn’s reliable Corporal Hicks, who packs an old pump-action shotgun alongside his space-age weaponry (“I like to keep this handy… for close encounters”) and who finds himself in the unexpected position of platoon leader after the aliens’ first onslaught wipes half of it out. There’s Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, the regulation android whom Ripley – mindful of what happened in the first movie – is extremely wary of; though after he’s saved her and saved the other surviving humans three or four times (even after he gets ripped in half) she comes to the realisation that he’s a good, if synthetic, bloke.

And there’s the motor-mouthed Private Hudson, played by the late, great Bill Paxton, who gets the film’s best lines. This is both before the aliens show up, when he’s a swaggering, show-offy git – “Hey Ripley, don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you… We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks!” – and after they show up, when he’s a quivering, whiny git – “Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events but we just got our asses kicked!”

But Aliens is no simple testosterone-fest. Dougal in Father Ted might have earmarked it for a ‘lads’ night in’ but it’s also, subversively, a chick-flick. At its heart are no fewer than four powerful female characters. There’s the splendid Sigourney Weaver, of course, back in the role of Ripley – though it’s in Aliens that both Weaver and Ripley properly achieve the status of cinematic icons. There’s Carrie Henn as Newt, the waif-like little girl who’s the colony’s only survivor and who, gradually, awakens Ripley’s maternal instincts. While Ripley spends the original movie reacting to and mainly running from the horrors around her, it’s thanks to Newt that in Aliens she becomes increasingly proactive and ends up running at them. Admittedly, that’s when she’s armed with a M41A Pulse Rifle / M240 Flamethrower.

And let’s not forget the impressive Private Vasquez, played by Jenette Goldstein, who’s more than a match than any man in her platoon. “All right,” she snarls at one point, “we got seven canisters of CM-20. I say we roll them in there and nerve-gas the whole f***in’ nest.” And when she’s not shooting down aliens, she’s shooting down Hudson’s bullshit, as happens in the following famous exchange: “Hey Vasquez. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No. Have you?”

The film’s final trump card also takes female form: the Alien Queen. Here, Cameron combines the design of the original alien, by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, with the concepts of an egg-laying queen termite and a tyrannosaurus rex. He creates a twenty-foot foe of terrifying savagery, strength and tenacity. And when she comes bearing down on Ripley at the movie’s climax, it’s clear to the audience that this is the showdown between the Big Bad Mommas. By this time, the Queen has seen her whole hellish brood wiped out. Meanwhile, Ripley is determined to defend what’s left of her family – Newt and the now-incapacitated Hicks and Bishop – to the death.

What more can I say? Aliens remains exhilarating nearly four decades on. Slowly and inexorably, the first half of the film winches you in. Thereafter, you find yourself strapped into a thrill-ride there’s no escape from. In the words of Private Hudson: “We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down!”