Tag: Game of Thrones

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Cinematic heroes 6: James Cosmo

 

© Icon Productions / Ladd Company / Paramount Pictures 

 

I’ve just realised that it’s the 30th anniversary of the release of Mel Gibson’s woad-slathered and not-entirely-historically-accurate epic Braveheart (1995).  This was the movie that added the battle-cry “FREEE-DOM!” to the chorus of things you hear outside Scottish pubs at closing time (along with “SHUT YER PUSS!” and “I’M OOT MA FACE!”).  Thus, it seems an appropriate time to post this tribute to one of the very best things in Braveheart, James Cosmo.

 

I’ll make no bones about it.  I f**king love the mighty Scottish character actor James Cosmo.

 

These days the hulking, craggy and formidable Cosmo – whose visage is usually bedecked with long white tresses of hair and a moustache that on anyone else would suggest ‘ageing hippy’, but on him suggest ‘someone you really don’t want to mess with’ – seems most familiar when he’s clad in armour and wielding a broadsword.  He’s carved a profitable niche for himself playing characters in movies and TV shows set in the ancient world, the Middle Ages and medieval fantasy lands, such as Highlander (1986), Braveheart (1995), Ivanhoe (1997), Cleopatra (1999), Troy (2004), The Lost Legion (2007), Game of Thrones (2011-2013), Hammer of the Gods (2013), Ben–Hur (2016), Outlaw / King (2018) and The Last Redemption (2024)  However, Cosmo, who was born in Clydebank and attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Bristol Old Vic Drama School, worked long and hard on television before he cornered the market for playing grizzled bear-like warriors in historical and fantasy epics.

 

He earned his acting spurs during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in a long line of TV shows and TV plays.  The better-known titles he appeared in include Doctor Finlay’s Casebook (1965 & 69), Softly Softly (1969), UFO (1971), The Persuaders (1971), Sutherland’s Law (1972), Quiller (1975), Survivors (1976), George and Mildred (1977), The Sweeney (1978), The Onedin Line (1979), The Professionals (1979), Strangers (1981), Minder (1984) and Fairly Secret Army (1984).  The most distinguished TV productions from this time to feature Cosmo were probably Nigel Kneale’s haunted-house-cum-sci-fi-horror-story The Stone Tape (1972) – its influence is detectable in many films and TV shows made since then, including the recent In the Earth (2021) and Enys Men (2022) – and the 1974 Play for Today adaptation of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, the most important piece of political theatre to surface in Scotland during the 1970s.

 

© Hammer Films / ITC Entertainment

 

I was in my mid-teens when I started to notice Cosmo as an actor.  He played a villain in an episode of The Hammer House of Horror (1980), which climaxed with him driving a cleaver into the skull of the fragrant Julia Foster, something that must have shocked those viewers who remembered her from the wholesome 1968 musical with Tommy Steele, Half a Sixpence.  That grisly scene made a big impression on me, although nothing compared to the impression it obviously made on Julia Foster.  He also appeared in 1981’s The Nightmare Man, a cheap but creepy BBC mini-series scripted by the great TV writer Robert Holmes about a mysterious killer stalking a fogbound Scottish island.  The Nightmare Man saw Cosmo in good company, as the cast also included Celia Imrie, James Warwick, Tom Watson and an equally craggy Scottish character actor, the late Maurice Roeves.

 

By the late 1980s Cosmo was becoming the go-to guy if you needed an imposing Scottish hard man in your production.  For example, he appeared in Brond, a 1987 Channel 4 adaptation of the novel by Frederic Lindsay, set in Glasgow and a thriller involving conspiracies and terrorism.  It tells the story of a hapless innocent, played by a very young John Hannah, who falls under the influence of the mysterious and sinister Brond of the title and ends up being accused of carrying out a political assassination.  Brond is played by the portly and menacing Stratford Johns, although Cosmo is no less intimidating as Primo, the silent, lethal hulk who acts as Brond’s henchman.  Two years later Cosmo had a similar role in the glossy Glasgow-set BBC thriller The Justice Game, in which this time he terrorised Dennis Lawson – yes, Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83) and real-life uncle of Ewan MacGregor.

 

Meanwhile, in 1986, Cosmo had appeared in Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, the fantasy movie about immortal beings feuding throughout human history.  He plays a member of the MacLeod clan in the medieval Scottish Highlands and he helps Christopher Lambert to escape when their superstitious fellow clansmen get alarmed about how, within hours, Lambert’s battle-wounds miraculously heal up.  Not only does Lambert turn out to be one of the immortals but he’s also the world’s most French-sounding Scotsman.  Later in the movie he encounters Sean Connery, who’s another immortal and also the world’s most Scottish-sounding Spaniard.  (The scene where Lambert explains to Connery what a haggis is has to be heard to be believed.)  Totally scatty, but loveable, I suspect Highlander was the movie that helped Cosmo secure the sweaty, muddy sword-and-sandals roles he became well-known for in the 1990s and 2000s.

 

© Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment / 20th Century Fox

 

The key sword-and-sandals role for Cosmo arrived in 1995 with the Mel Gibson-directed, Mel-Gibson-starring Braveheart, in which he plays Campbell, father of Hamish, best friend to 13th / 14th-century Scottish freedom-fighter William Wallace.  Playing Hamish is the huge, ursine Brendan Gleeson, who later found fame in Michael McDonagh’s glorious 2008 comedy-thriller In Bruges.  If anyone is even huger and more ursine-looking than Gleeson and could convincingly play his dad, it’s Cosmo.  In reality, the two actors are only seven years apart in age.

 

Seven years old is also about the age that Isabella of France would have been in real life during the events depicted in Braveheart.  In the film, she’s played by Sophie Marceau (in her late twenties at the time), is presented as English King Edward I’s daughter-in-law and has a sizzling romance with Gibson’s Wallace.  This sums up the film’s cavalier disregard for historical accuracy.  (It also gave stand-up comedian Stewart Lee material for a routine about William Wallace being a paedophile, which he bravely delivered in Glasgow.)  The film is also anti-English to a degree that wouldn’t be acceptable against any other ethnic, national or cultural group in a Hollywood movie.  But in the film’s defence I’ll say that the battle scenes, for their time, were excellent.  And the supporting cast that Gibson assembled – Cosmo, Gleeson, Marceau, David O’Hara, Patrick McGoohan, Catherine McCormack, Angus McFadyen, Ian Bannen – is excellent too.

 

As Campbell Senior, Cosmo comes across as a near-unstoppable force of nature.  He gets skewered with an arrow at the initial uprising in Lanark but ignores that and carries on fighting.  He gets his hand chopped off at the Battle of Stirling but ignores that and carries on fighting too.  Even when someone embeds an axe in his stomach at the Battle of Falkirk, he keeps going long enough to deliver a moving farewell speech to Gleeson.

 

A year later Cosmo appeared in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, the movie that gave the world an equally potent image of Scotland, if a rather different one from that given by Braveheart.  In fact, Trainspotting, based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh, is the modern-urban-Scottish-junkie yin to Braveheart’s heroic-medieval-Scottish-warrior yang.  In Trainspotting, he plays another dad, this time of Ewan MacGregor’s Renton character, a junkie so desperate for his next fix that he’ll crawl into the shit-encrusted bowl of the Worst Toilet in Scotland to get it.

 

While it’s nice to see his face in the film, Cosmo is kept very much in the background.  Gratifyingly, he got more to do when Boyle, MacGregor and the rest of the Trainspotting crew finally reunited in 2017 to make Trainspotting 2, based loosely on parts of Welsh’s original novel that were left out of the first film and on its 2002 literary sequel Porno.  Trainspotting 2 concludes — in an ending that radically differs from that of Porno — with Renton deciding home is the best place for him.  So he gives his now-widowed father a hug and moves into the latter’s spare bedroom (where, of course, he promptly starts dancing to Iggy Pop’s 1977 classic, Lust for Life).

 

© Material Pictures / Highland Midgie / Amazon Studios

 

After Braveheart, Cosmo was kept busy with sword-wielding roles, including 12 episodes as Jeor Mormont in Game of Thrones.  However, he’s also become something of a fixture in recent British and Irish horror / thriller movies – he’s appeared in Urban Ghost Story (1998), Outcast (2009), The Glass Man (2011), Citadel (2012), January (2015), Dark Signal (2016), Malevolent (2018), The Hole in the Ground (2019), Get Duked! (2019), The Kindred (2022) and The Beast Within (2024).  Of these, I enjoyed the horror-comedy Get Duked! the most.  It’s the story of four lads tramping around in the Scottish Highlands whilst trying to earn their Duke of Edinburgh Award – and realising they’re being hunted by a weird pair of aristocratic psychopaths (played by Eddie Izzard and Georgie Glen).  Cosmo turns up in it as a farmer the boys encounter in the course of their misadventures.

 

It’s normal for secondary characters in horror films to be nothing but cannon fodder – they soon get killed off to ratchet up suspense and demonstrate the power and evilness of the monster or villain.  But Get Duked! makes those secondary characters interesting, keeps them around and has a lot of fun with them.  Which is smart because it has a splendid supporting cast: Cosmo, Jonathan Aris and, as bumbling police officers, Kate Dickie, Alice Lowe and another veteran Scottish actor, Brian Pettifer.  Despite first being sighted in a boiler suit and at the wheel of a tractor, Cosmo’s character proves to have a side not normally associated with Highland farmers.  He has a fondness for certain hallucinogenic substances and is soon grooving to a mix CD that the lads give him.

 

Unexpectedly, Cosmo has a further speciality, which is for playing Santa Claus.  According to his IMDB profile he’s now filled the furry boots of Saint Nick on three different occasions, most famously in the 2005 Disney version of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

 

He’s a pleasingly ubiquitous and varied performer.  In the past decade I’ve seen him in things as different as SS-GB (2017), the BBC drama serial based on Len Deighton’s 1978 alternative-history thriller and set in a Nazi-Germany-controlled London in 1941; Wonder Woman (2017), one of the few decent DC Comics movie adaptations, in which he plays Field Marshal Douglas Haig; and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019), where he’s one of the miners drafted in to dig a tunnel under the stricken plant’s melted uranium and prevent it from leaking into the Black Sea.  His IMDb page currently lists no fewer than eight upcoming projects, so clearly he’s keeping busy.  Meanwhile, on the non-acting side, he was a contestant in the 2017 series of Celebrity Big Brother and has recently been doing a speaking tour entitled An Evening With James Cosmo.

 

Though he’s well into his eighth decade, James Cosmo looks as daunting as ever.  His visage, bulk and general demeanour suggest a man whom you definitely don’t want to give any cheek to.  And if you are foolhardy enough to give him cheek, he’ll probably kebab you on a long rusty medieval pike and simultaneously slash your throat with a sgian dubh.  That’s the sort of guy I’d like to be when I become eligible for my bus-pass.

 

© HBO Entertainment / Television 360

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Liar wolves, not dire wolves

 

From unsplash.com / © Reyk Odinson

 

Donald Trump has recently rampaged through the world’s global trade system with the delicacy of Godzilla taking a stomp around downtown Tokyo.  That would be Godzilla after he’d been on a week-long cocaine binge.  So, in the current climate of gloom, dread and despondency, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the world’s news outlets have latched desperately and uncritically onto a story that looks like good, even uplifting, news.  Those news outlets have made much of the claim by an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company called Colossal Biosciences that it’s created the first dire wolves to have graced Planet Earth in about ten millennia.

 

The dire wolf, according to Wikipedia, is “an extinct species of canine which was native to the Americas during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs (125,000-10,000 years ago).”  It was generally bigger than most modern wolves.  Research suggests “the average dire wolf to be similar in size to the largest modern grey wolf.”  Dire wolves also pop up in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1991-2011), but more about that in a minute.

 

The headlines have come fast and furious: DIRE WOLF REPORTEDLY BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION; NO LONGER EXTINCT: DIRE WOLVES HOWL AGAIN AFTER 12,000 YEARS; LONG EXTINCT, DIRE WOLVES ARE BACK, AND NOT JUST IN GAME OF THRONES; SCIENTISTS PERFORM WORLD’S FIRST DE-EXTINCTION TO REVIVE THE DIRE WOLF THAT VANISHED 12,000 YEARS AGO.  Time Magazine stuck a picture of one of three dire wolves supposedly created by Colossal Biosciences on a recent cover, below the word ‘extinct’ with a line scored through it and the inspiring message: “This is Remus.  He’s a dire wolf.  The first to exist in over 10,000 years.  Endangered species could be changed forever.”

 

So hey, this is great news, yeah?  Extinction is bad, so ‘de-extinction’ must be good, right?  And since much extinction in the last couple of millennia had been caused by humanity, isn’t it gratifying to see good old human know-how being put to work reversing the process and bringing one – hopefully the first of many – extinct species back?

 

Except, of course, that it’s a load of bollocks.  The New Scientist has responded to the company’s claims with an article whose lead-in puts it succinctly: “Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species.”  Although some genuine dire-wolf DNA was used in the project, the genome was merely analysed to determine what a dire wolf’s key traits would be.  The DNA itself was way too aged and decayed to be spliced into anything, Jurassic Park-style.  The Colossal Biosciences team then made edits to modern-day grey-wolf DNA to replicate those dire-wolf traits.  Finally, three modified wolf-pups were produced using domestic-dog surrogate mothers and caesarean sections.  So what you’ve got aren’t dire wolves.  You’ve got three grey-wolf pups that’ve been tinkered with genetically to give them characteristics the team think dire wolves might have had.

 

The analogy here isn’t the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park (1993).  No, it’s Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison and Jill St John.  In that film, the dinosaur special effects were achieved by taking modern reptiles like iguanas, monitor lizards and crocodiles and glueing horns, frills and fins onto them to make look ‘dinosaur-ish’.   Which is what’s been done with these young grey wolves in a fancy, high-tech way.

 

The Irish-American palaeontologist and writer Caitlin R. Kiernan summed it up bluntly in her online journal the other day: “…there’s this bullshit about a company named Colossal Biosciences claiming to have resurrected dire wolves.  They haven’t.  Not even close.  It’s a hoax that would make P.T. Barnum proud.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © American Museum of Natural History

 

Also, it’s not merely nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.  It makes extinction sound like something that’s solvable through scientific jiggery-pokery, an error that can be fixed without the arduous, inconvenient lengths that human beings need to go to to prevent extinctions happening, which is to stop killing life-forms through hunting, habitat-destruction, economic consumption and general greed, cruelty and ignorance.

 

In the last few days alone, I’ve seen stories on the Guardian’s environment page about a report on New Zealand’s environment, which warns that “76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles” are “threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened”; and a warning by 32 charity organisations that proposals under the British government’s new planning bill “could push species towards extinction and lead to irreversible loss”; and the grim likelihood that Donald Trump’s decimation of USAID will wreck conservation projects leading to increased poaching and habitat encroachment and serious threats to such animals as lemurs, white rhinos, gorillas, orangutans and elephants.

 

The uncritical coverage given to the dire-wolf story is harmful because it encourages the idea that animal extinction is not so serious now because science can resurrect those animals later.  Which would be bad enough if the idea was based on proper science.  But it’s not – it’s based on the spin coming out of Colossal Biosciences.

 

As I said, direwolves (spelt not as two but as one word) turn up in the Game of Thrones books: “Direwolves once roamed the north in large packs…   According to Theon Greyjoy, direwolves have not been sighted south of the Wall for two hundred years.  Rangers of the Night’s Watch hear direwolves beyond the Wall.”  I’m quoting a Game of Thrones wiki here, as I’ve never read the books.  I haven’t watched the 2011-2019 TV show based on them either, having always intended to read the books first.

 

I find it a bit disappointing that Games of Thrones author George R.R. Martin seems to have swallowed the Colossal Biosciences hype hook, line and sinker.  In a recent blogpost, he said in February he’d been to visit the secret installation where the three supposed direwolves are being kept.  Obviously in a state of giddy excitement, he declared: “I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon…  And Colossal is just beginning.   Still to come, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and… yes… the dodo…  I can’t wait.” The post also has an undeniably cute picture of him holding one of the genetically-edited beasties.

 

To be fair to Martin, I suppose it must be flattering to have a biotech company pay you the compliment of (allegedly) creating some animals that nowadays most people only know as fantasy-creatures in your novels.  So flattering that it’s befuddled his critical faculties.  Of course, it’s likely that Colossal Biosciences chose to work on dire wolves because the creatures are currently famous due to the Game of Thrones phenomenon – making it an excellent PR stunt that’s earned them lots of headlines.

 

And I suppose, as someone who writes fantasy fiction under the penname Rab Foster, I’d be flattered too if a biotech company offered to create some fabulous animals or monsters that’d appeared in my stories.  Not that there’s much chance of that happening – last year, as Rab Foster, I earned about 75 pounds, which I suspect is a wee bit less than George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones royalties for 2024.  If any biotech outfit was up for it, though, I’d like them to have a go at creating the sinister miniature-harpy things in my 2022 short story Crows of the Mynchmoor, which were basically crows’ bodies with shrunken copies of a witch’s head grafted onto then.  I’d like a flock of those to keep in my garden.  I bet they’d really creep out folk passing by on the street.

 

© 20th Century Fox

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Rab Foster gets grim

 

 © Schlock! Webzine

 

Rab Foster, my penname when I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new story published.  It’s called The Mechanisms of Raphar and it appears in the November 2024 – Volume 18, Issue 13 – edition of Schlock! Webzine.

 

Once upon a time, I believed fantasy fiction came in two varieties only.  One type consisted of 1000-page-long, telephone-directory-sized epics whose narratives involved quests, wizards, kings and queens, elves, hobbits and orcs and the first thing you saw when you opened the books was a lavishly detailed map of the fantasy-land in question.  This J.R.R. Tolkien-esque variety was known as ‘high fantasy’.  Alternatively, there were short stories where Conan the Barbarian, armed with only a broadsword and a leather jockstrap, cut a bloody swathe through enemy warriors, slew the occasional giant snake and earned himself the adoration of the occasional busty maiden.  These were examples of the more down-and-dirty ‘sword and sorcery’ variety, of which Robert E. Howard was the leading practitioner.

 

But not anymore.  Nowadays, if I type the question, “What are the different types of fantasy fiction?” into Google, it gives me 24 sub-genres.  These include all sorts of nice, cheery-sounding things such as ‘hopepunk’ (“about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges”), ‘romantasy’ (which are “typically set in fantastical worlds, with fairies, dragons, magic, but also feature classic romance plotlines – enemies-to-lovers, soulmates, love triangles”) and ‘cosy fantasy’ (“works that contain or portray a comforting healing ambience to the story… centre on slice of life moments… and are often gentle in their narratives”).  A well-known example of that last sub-genre is Travis Baldree’s 2023 novel Legends & Lattes, in which an orc and a succubus join forces to… open a coffee shop.  Now I’m not going to slag off Legends & Lattes because it’s wrong to diss a book I haven’t read.  Let me merely say it doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.  Or indeed, cup of coffee.

 

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the niceness spectrum from hopepunk, romantasy and cosy fantasy is… grimdark.  This is the nihilistic, blood-soaked, everyone’s-a-bastard variety of fantasy most famously essayed in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1996-2011) and TV series (2011-19).  The science-fiction author Adam Roberts has described grimdark as fantasy stories where “nobody is honourable and might is right”, and which “turn their backs on the more uplifting Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealised medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then really was.”

 

I’m not that big a fan of grimdark.  I sometimes find its ‘everything sucks’ attitude rather adolescent.  But The Mechanisms of Raphar is pretty grim, and pretty dark, so I guess it qualifies as a story of this type.  I’ve experienced a few lows recently, especially in my professional life, and I can hardly say I’m enchanted with the state of the world in 2024, so perhaps the story is a manifestation of my current discontent.

 

The Mechanisms of Raphar was vaguely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum.  Unlike the famous 1961 movie version directed by Roger Corman, which was about Vincent Price mourning his dead wife in a castle that coincidentally happened to have a few torture instruments stowed in its cellar, Poe’s original tale is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who tries to withstand the various devices of torture they use against him.  In The Mechanisms of Raphar, the villains are an insane, sado-masochistic religious cult who worship a god of pain, have a giant temple that’s packed full of torture-machines, and make their services available – for a fee – to people who want other people to suffer horribly, such as despots and their prisoners or other religions and their heretics.  I’m from Northern Ireland, so I don’t have a high opinion of organised religion.  I think this shows in the story.

 

Incidentally, the name ‘Raphar’ is nearly an anagram of ‘Haw Par’, which is my tribute to Haw Par Villa, the most extraordinary museum in Singapore.  Haw Par Villa’s most famous – or notorious – attraction is a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell where you can see the souls of sinners being horrifically tortured and punished for the crimes they committed while they were alive.  Indeed, the ‘Tree of Blades’ that features in the story is inspired by the ‘Tree of Knives’, festooned with bloodied bodies, on display in Haw Par Villa’s depiction of hell.

 

 

Until the end of November, The Mechanisms of Raphar can be read here, while you can access the contents page of Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine here.

 

And now that I’ve hopefully worked that bloodlust out of my system, maybe I will write a cosy fantasy next…  Maybe my next Rab Foster story will be one where a kelpie and a balrog join forces to open a tea-room in Goblin-land.

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Who shot J.R.R.?

 

© George Allen & Unwin

 

I’ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55).  There…  I’ve said it.

 

When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to 1077 pages.  I stumbled through about 800 pages of it.  Sometimes I left it aside for months and when I returned I had to reread long tracts of it to remind myself what was going on.  Eventually, I abandoned it forever at the bit where Frodo and Sam blunder into the lair of Shelob, the giant spider.  Thus, for years afterwards, I wasn’t entirely sure if (a) Frodo got to complete his quest, and (b) he didn’t end up as giant-spider-food.  Though, given the probability of a happy ending, I assumed that (a) he did, and (b) he didn’t.  Finally, in 2003, I saw Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Return of the King and my assumptions were confirmed.

 

I found Tolkien’s writing style plodding at times, but what really defeated me was the dullness of the characters.  The evil ones (Gollum, Saruman) were interesting, but as far as the good guys were concerned, the ones I was supposed to be rooting for…  Dearie me.  I had hopes for Aragorn early on, in his guise as the enigmatic Strider, but my curiosity soon waned.  Boromir was agreeably conflicted, but he didn’t make it beyond the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.  (In the 2001 movie version, he’s played by Sean Bean, so you know immediately what’s going to happen to him.)  Meanwhile, the Hobbits of the Shire were insufferably bland.  Their nicey-nicey, respectable, know-your-place-and-respect-your-betters manner so annoyed me that I suspected if the Shire had newspapers, the Daily Mail and Daily Express would dominate the market.  Sam Gamgee, tending to Frodo like a batman serving a member of the officer class, was particularly irksome in his cap-doffing.

 

No wonder the fantasy and science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote sourly of Lord of the Rings: “If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence, the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’… and ‘civilised’ behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’.”

 

And though I was a teenager at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that if I read The Lord of the Rings now, I’d have an epiphany, revise my opinion of the trilogy and acclaim it as a masterpiece.  For one thing, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy (1968, 70 & 72) and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946, 50 & 59) around the same time and thought they were brilliant.  Indeed, the first two Gormenghast volumes are among my all-time favourite books.  Also back then, I tried reading Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), which is sometimes credited with kickstarting the ‘grimdark’ movement in modern fantasy – more on that in a moment – and thought it was dreadful shite, an assessment shared by many people whose judgement I trust.  So I doubt if my evaluation of Tolkien today would be any different.

 

© Penguin Books

 

I should add that I never had a problem with the Lord of the Rings movies.  However, I generally see literature as a denser, more complicated and more profound medium than cinema.  And though something might seem a bit staid when written on the page, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be ineffective in the less demanding medium of images and sounds that greets you when you enter a cinema or log into a movie-streaming service.  For me, Lord of the Rings was perfectly palatable as a series of two-to-three-hour viewing experiences where you could enjoy the performances of some great actors and actresses (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee et al), the stunning New Zealand scenery and Peter Jackson’s obvious flair for orchestrating action and spectacle.  They contained too much CGI, of course, but that goes without saying these days.

 

So, why am I writing this?  Well, last month saw the publication of an essay entitled Grimdull in the Critic, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘monthly British political and cultural magazine’ whose contributors ‘include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young’.  The swivel-eyed loopiness of three of those four contributors should give you an idea of where the Critic stands on the political spectrum.  The essay’s writer Sebastian Milbank – also The Critic’s executive editor – says this of the author of Lord of the Rings:

 

“Those who followed Tolkien, even from a commercial perspective, understood that modern fantasy was following in his wake; he gave a sense of moral and literary seriousness to the building of imaginary worlds, which would otherwise be absorbed into moralistic allegory or semi-comical whimsy.  Tolkien’s world feels ‘real’ not only because of his attention to detail, but because he builds a sense of emotionally freighted history and recognisable moral stakes, set out in a language strange enough to be compelling, familiar enough to be taken seriously.”

 

Alas for Tolkien’s worthy legacy, Milbank argues, modern fantasy writing has been taken over and corrupted by grimdark, ‘a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings’, popularized by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and the blockbusting, blood-tits-and-dragons-meister that is George R.R. Martin.  “It’s a genre…” Milbank bellyaches, “generally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance.  Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive.  Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen.  Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed… as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it.  Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.”

 

© Bantam Books

 

Even worse, laments Milbank, it’s all the fault of the liberal left.  “It’s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative ‘industries’.”

 

Who shot J.R.R.?  Those lefty grimdark degenerates did!  Basically, Milbank’s trying to open another front in the culture wars.  This time it’s evil, modern fantasy writers versus the decent, traditional, conservative values embodied by Tolkien.

 

So much is wrong in his analysis that I don’t have time to detail it all here.  I’d direct you, though, to this recent riposte penned by the writer Cora Buhlert.  Firstly, she takes Milbank to task for his many omissions, made either through ignorance of fantasy literature or through disingenuity.  In presenting the field as a simple battleground between Tolkien and grimdark, he ignores Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and the copious fantasy writing that went on in the old American pulp magazines, by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore, which helped popularize the sub-genre of sword and sorcery and gave us the character of Conan the Barbarian.  Simultaneously, Buhlert notes, no mention is made of other trends in modern fantasy writing, such as hopepunk, cosy fantasy or romantasy.

 

Indeed, she points out how Milbank doesn’t so much move the goalposts in his definition of grimdark as go sprinting off with the goalposts over his shoulders.  In the course of his tortured polemic, he refers to TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-22), Boardwalk Empire (2010-14) and Breaking Bad (2008-13) and superhero movies like Captain America: Civil War (2016).  Two of those examples aren’t remotely classifiable as fantasy – unless I remember wrongly and Walter White was actually an Orc – while the other two have nothing to do with the literature, set in medieval fantasy worlds, that he’s allegedly writing about.

 

Milbank also takes potshots at Philip Pullman, even though, as Buhlert observes, books like Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) aren’t grimdark either.  Presumably, Pullman gets a mention because, as a famous atheist, he’s a red flag to a bull as far as crazed Christian-morality-campaigners are concerned.  (“Philip Pullman is a stupid, delusional, immoral, inhuman piece of garbage, while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were geniuses, amazing authors, and great human beings,” declared one comment I read on an American fantasy website recently.)  And predictably, he slates Michael Moorcock for being ‘terribly dated’ in his anti-establishment views.  Strangely, considering how Moorcock’s fantasy stories have greatly influenced the modern fantasy genre too, Milbank attacks him using the example of his 1966 novella Behold the Man, which is actually a work of science fiction.

 

One other serious flaw that Buhlert identifies in Milbank’s essay is his implication that Tolkien popularised fantasy fiction in one fell swoop in the 1950s.  But it wasn’t until the 1960s, when Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback in the USA, and possibly not until the 1970s, when imitators like Terry Brooks began to publish doorstop-sized ‘high-fantasy’ trilogies of their own, that Tolkien’s influence really began to be felt.

 

© Overlook Press

 

I’d add that when I was a teenager it wasn’t just me and Michael Moorcock who disliked Tolkien.  I got the impression he wasn’t particularly valued by the literary establishment – whose posh, starchy gatekeepers at the time are probably the sort of chaps whom the young-fogeyish Milbank looks back on with great admiration.  Indeed, Edmund Wilson famously dismissed Lord of the Rings as ‘a children’s book that somehow got out of hand’, ‘an overgrown fairy story’, ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’.  Anthony Burgess conspicuously failed to mention it in his volume Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, though he was broadminded enough to include science-fiction and fantasy books by and / or authors like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Alasdair Gray, George Orwell, Keith Roberts, T.H. White and, yes, Mervyn Peake in his list.

 

Cora Buhlert complains that Milbank’s essay “feels as if it time-travelled here from the early 2010s…  Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?”  Actually, I get the impression he probably did write the thing about a decade ago, perhaps as a moan against the then astronomical popularity of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) TV series.  But, recognising the essay’s myriad shortcomings, he left it on the shelf – until now.

 

Because today we live in a time where Britain’s Conservative Party politicians, and their hordes of supporters who infest the mainly right-wing British media, are aware that, if the opinion polls and by-election results are to be believed, they’re in for a massive humping at the next general election.  So dismal have the Conservatives’ 14 years in government been that their only strategy now is to try and ignite, and fight, a massive culture war on all fronts imaginable.

 

Thus, we’ve had ex-Tory-prime minister, and catastrophe, Liz Truss – her with the shelf-life of a lettuce – raving about her premiership being sabotaged by ‘trans-activists’ in the civil service.  Former Deputy Conservative Party Chairman ‘30p’ Lee Anderson claiming that London’s Labour Party mayor is in the pocket of ‘Islamists’.  Neil Oliver ranting about vaccines on far-right channel GB News.  The Daily Mail dismissing young people’s mental health problems as ‘snowflakery’.  The police, the universities, the judiciary, the National Trust, Net Zero, speed restrictions, the English football team, TV sitcoms, Doctor Who, James Bond, you name it, British right-wingers have tried to pick a fight with it, often for the sin of being ‘woke’.

 

It was just a matter of time before they got around to modern fantasy literature.  Hence, Tolkien’s been weaponized.

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

Posted on

Rab Foster clears the foliage

 

© Jim Pitts / Parallel Universe Publications

 

Rab Foster, the pen-name under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a short story published in the collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3.  This is the tenth piece by Mr Foster that’s seen publication in recent years, which I’m pleased, but also surprised about.  I’ve always enjoyed reading fantasy literature by the likes of C. L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, but for most of the 21st century I’d assumed there were few outlets where you could get works in the genre published – at least, in its short-story form, which is my speciality.  However, lately, there seems to have been a surge in the number of magazines, ezines and anthologies devoted to fantasy fiction, which has created many new opportunities.  Maybe this is due to the popularity of the Games of Thrones TV series (2011-19).  If so, thanks for that, George R.R. Martin.

 

I’m particularly happy to have a story published in this collection because it’s been put together by David A. Riley and Jim Pitts at Parallel Universe Publications.  Lancastrian artist Jim Pitts has illustrated the volume and I well remember his artwork from 40 years ago when it appeared in a magazine called Fantasy Tales.  As I said in a recent blog-entry, Fantasy Tales was the first publication that I, as a young, aspiring and acne-ridden writer, submitted stories to.  While they weren’t accepted, one of Fantasy Tales’ editors, Dave Sutton, was decent enough to write back and offer advice about how to make my work more organised and presentable.  He told me to leave spaces after punctuation marks when I was typing my manuscripts, so that my sentences didn’t turn into typographical pile-ups.  Also, in an effort to build tension, I employed a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, which hit the protagonists with one revelation after another.  Probably not a good idea, he pointed out, to have six or seven one-sentence paragraphs in a row…

 

I remember Fantasy Tales as a gorgeous-looking little magazine, with Pitt’s colour artwork adorning its cover and his intricate, atmospheric black-and-white illustrations on the pages inside.  Here’s a few examples.

 

© Jim Pitts / Fantasy Tales

© Jim Pitts / Parallel Universe Publications

 

Anyhow, I’m chuffed that one of my stories is sharing a book with Jim Pitts’ artwork at last.

 

Rab Foster’s story in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is entitled The Foliage, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that I started writing it soon after watching the movie In the Earth (2021), a forest-set piece of sci-fi / horror eco-weirdness from filmmaker Ben Wheatley.  The story also owes something to a 1976 Doctor Who adventure called The Seeds of Doom, which featured Tom Baker as the Doctor and a marvellously-deranged Tony Beckley and John Challis (who later became a much-loved comedy actor and who, sadly, died in September this year) as the villains.  I know nerds between the ages of 15 and 70 will argue till the cows come home about what the scariest ever Doctor Who adventure is, but for my money, The Seeds of Doom is the one.

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is currently available at amazon.co.uk here and at amazon.com here.

Posted on

The real Princess Diana

 

© ITV / ABC / Thames

 

2020 has been a rotten year and I suspect it still has more rottenness in store.  One of the many reasons why I’ve found it so godawful has been because it’s seen the deaths of two actresses who meant a lot to me, firstly because they both had leading roles in James Bond movies and I’m a big James Bond fan, and secondly because they both starred in one of my favourite TV shows, The Avengers (1961-69).  I’m talking, of course, about Honor Blackman, who died in April, and now Diana Rigg, who died last week.

 

I never got to see Diana Rigg perform on stage, where she appeared in plays by Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Chekov, Noel Coward, Henrik Ibsen, Molière, Jean Racine, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and, obviously, William Shakespeare.  Nor did I catch her when, after becoming a Dame in the mid-1990s and being recognised as a national treasure, she appeared in prestigious TV productions like Rebecca (1997) or Victoria & Albert (2001), both of which resulted in her winning or being nominated for Emmy Awards.  I was living abroad and didn’t have access to English-language TV at the time.

 

I didn’t even watch her much-praised performance as Olenna Tyrell in the TV show Game of Thrones from 2013 to 2017, since I thought I should first read the George R.R. Martin books on which the show was based – something I’ve yet to get around to doing.

 

Despite what I’ve missed, however, I offer here a collection of Diana Rigg performances that I have seen and remember fondly.

 

Playing Tracy di Vincenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is ostensibly about James Bond (George Lazenby in his one-and-only shot at the role) tangling with his arch-enemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld (Telly Savalas).  However, it also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.  Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo (Rigg), daughter of the boss of the crime syndicate the Unione Corse of Corsica.  At the film’s end, Blofeld is seemingly vanquished and Bond and Tracy get married.  Then Blofeld makes a sudden reappearance in the final scene, sprays their honeymoon car with bullets, kills Tracy and leaves Bond as a babbling wreck.

 

Fascinatingly, for a film franchise that’s often accused of de-humanising the Ian Fleming novels that inspired it and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in OHMSS-the film than in OHMSS-the-novel.  She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Particularly memorable is her appearance after Bond escapes from Blofeld’s Alpine headquarters.  Hunted by Blofeld’s henchmen, exhausted, frightened even – something that Lazenby, despite or perhaps because of his acting inexperience, conveys well – he takes refuge in a crowded Christmas market / ice rink in the local town.  Just as he thinks he not going to make it, Rigg comes to his rescue, unexpectedly skating into view in front of him like some heaven-sent angel of mercy.

 

Playing Sonya Winter in The Assassination Bureau (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service wasn’t the only instance in 1969 of Diana Rigg rubbing shoulders with Telly Savalas.  In Basil Deardon’s black comedy The Assassination Bureau (based on an unfinished Jack London novel), she plays an aspiring female journalist in Edwardian London sent by Savalas’s unscrupulous newspaper proprietor to investigate a secret criminal organisation offering assassins for hire.  Armed with a bagful of money that Savalas has provided, Rigg brazenly hires this Assassination Bureau to assassinate its own chairman, Ivan Dragomiloff, who’s played by Oliver Reed.  Admiring Rigg’s audacity, Reed accepts the commission and, with her in tow, spends the movie zigzagging around Europe dodging the efforts of his own board of directors to kill him.

 

It’s a pleasantly silly film and, admirably, doesn’t waste any time in setting up its convoluted premise and getting into the action.  Rigg is delightful as the uppity Sonya Winter, determinedly doing her job and flying the flag for women’s rights amid a world of starchy, patronising male chauvinists.  Meanwhile, Reed had only just played the brutish Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1968) and at the time was in contention to play James Bond, although his reputation for drunken offscreen hi-jinks put 007 producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman off the idea.  His pairing with Rigg in The Assassination Bureau is no beauty-and-the-beast affair, however.  He dials down the roughness and dials up the charm so that their chemistry together is actually very pleasing.

 

© Paramount Pictures

 

Playing Edwina Lionheart in Theatre of Blood (1973)

Douglas Hickox’s brilliant comedy-horror movie Theatre of Blood has Vincent Price as an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor who starts killing the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, using murders methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays.  “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic Meredith Merridew, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus.  As the corpses pile up, murdered in ways suggested by Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Richard III, Henry VI: Part One and even The Merchant of Venice (Price rewrites it so that he can extract a pound of flesh from Harry Andrews), the youngest and least obnoxious critic, played by Ian Hendry, and the investigating police officers, played by Milo O’Shea and Eric Sykes, turn to Lionheart’s supposedly normal daughter, Edwina (Rigg), for help.

 

Distraught about what her father is doing, yet repulsed by the critics who destroyed his career, Edwina is initially a troubled and conflicted character.  Yet as the film progresses, it transpires that Rigg is having as much fun in her role as the Bard-quoting, soliloquizing Price is in his.

 

Taking the mickey out of herself in The Morecambe and Wise Show (1975), The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and Extras (2006)

Rigg never took herself too seriously.  She teamed up with Britain’s most famous comic double-act Morecambe and Wise for their 1975 Christmas TV special, where she appeared in the inevitable Ernie Wise-penned play.  This featured Rigg as Nell Gwynne, Eric Morecambe as Charles II and Wise as Samuel Pepys.  (“Have you read Ernie’s play?” demands Morecambe.  “Yes, I have,” replies Rigg.  “And you’re still here?”)  Better still is her appearance in The Great Muppet Caper, the second movie starring Jim Henson’s much-loved puppets, in which she plays the snooty fashion designer Lady Holiday, who’s robbed of her jewellery by a gang led by her devious brother (Charles Grodin).  Predictably, Miss Piggy approaches Rigg in the hope of securing a job as a fashion model and insists on showing Rigg her portfolio: “This is me reeking grandeur!”

 

And then there’s a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s comedy show Extras, which is about a struggling actor (Gervais) trying to make ends meet with bit-parts and uncredited roles in films and on television.  This scenario enables the show’s gimmick of having real, famous actors and actresses play versions of themselves – usually twisted, unpleasant versions.  In this particular episode, Gervais gets a three-day job in a new fantasy film starring the then-17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and Dame Diana Rigg.  The joke is that Radcliffe is a randy, boorish and clueless teenager.  Whilst eating with him in the studio canteen, Radcliffe tries to convince Gervais that he’s a man of the world by whipping a condom out of his pocket – he’s unravelled it but seems to think he can still put it on – and then accidentally pings it through the air to a nearby table, where it lands on the unamused Rigg’s head.  Radcliffe asks her for his ‘johnny back’ and gets a schoolmistress-ly reply: “May I have my prophylactic back, please?”

 

Later, Radcliffe sidles up to her and inquires, “You still got that catsuit from The Avengers?”  Rigg retorts: “Go away, Daniel.”

 

© BBC / HBO

 

And that brings me nicely to…

 

Playing Emma Peel in The Avengers (1965-67)

By the time Rigg joined The Avengers in the mid-1960s, the show, under the guidance of creator Brian Clemens, had gradually mutated from being a conventional action / thriller show with Patrick Macnee’s John Steed and Ian Hendry’s Dr David Keel as a pair of crime-fighters to being a television phenomenon that did everything on its own terms, both determinedly non-realistic and restlessly inventive.

 

Rigg’s tenure on The Avengers was surely its golden era.  With her Emma Peel character partnering Macnee’s now surreally debonair Steed, and the show being broadcast in colour for the first time, it was a self-confident cocktail of the funny, the silly, the fantastical, the baroque and, occasionally, the gothic and the kinky.  (The kinkiness factor came to the fore in an episode called A Touch of Brimstone, wherein Rigg dons a costume comprising a spiked collar, whalebone corset, black leather boots and a snake.  Funnily enough, this attracted the highest viewing figures of any episode in The Avengers’ eight-year history.)

 

Rigg brought to the show a bemused, unruffled quirkiness that was the equal of Macnee’s majestic imperturbability.  She was also his equal in being proactive, having no qualms about wading into fights to show off her martial arts prowess or hurtling around in a Lotus Elan.  As a villain in one episode remarked, “She’s well and truly emancipated, is that one.”

 

Rigg wasn’t comfortable about the fact, but Emma Peel also became a sex symbol.  She couldn’t well avoid it, being ephemerally gorgeous and clad in a succession of leather catsuits, mini-skirts and mod-inspired outfits that, inevitably, ended up being sold in the ladies’ fashion shops of the real Britain.  Wisely, though, sex was off the agenda in her character’s onscreen relationship with Macnee’s Steed.  The two indulged in a relaxed, platonic flirtatiousness and left it at that.  Macnee did get a kiss from her at the end of her final episode on the show, when she left him with the parting advice: “Always keep your bowler on in times of stress, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.”

 

Appearing at the height of the swinging 1960s, but tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted rather than smug, which is how I find many productions from the time, The Avengers, and especially the Emma Peel-era Avengers, projects a charming and not-taking-itself-seriously notion of Britishness that seems light-years removed from the discredited, embittered, clapped-out Britain of 2020.  The death of Diana Rigg, who’d been one of the last links with the show, just seems to emphasise that it’s now all in the past.

 

© ITV / ABC / Thames