Queen Elizabeth II – Blood and Porridge

October 28, 2023October 31, 2023

Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

© Duckworth Books

Another Halloween-inspired post…

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema. Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living. But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc. This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War. His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular. Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq. And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes. Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games. With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon. (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.) Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21^st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984). It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report. He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate… Too many opinions, too many feelings. That’s not what this report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.” So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework. The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc. It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their experiences of the conflict with the undead. The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched. Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense. For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A. I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics… We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.” But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work. And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though. An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly. To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too. It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro. Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener. He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him. Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction. But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism. Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long. I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes. Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London. There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II. She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland. Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’ Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.” That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones. Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis. Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada. They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake. Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food. Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours. “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore. A couple of times I stepped in human shit. Nobody was even bothering to bury it.” By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty. It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency. And the zombies aren’t even around. They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere. The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons. Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients. Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013. No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II. This gives it an oddly historical feel now. Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s. And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023. For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump. Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’. Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all. Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it. If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it. A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

May 22, 2023June 11, 2023

Happy World Goth Day 2023

From worldgothday.com / © BatBoy Slim

Today, May 22^nd, is among other things International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, National Vanilla Pudding Day and, due to it being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, Sherlock Holmes Day. However, what piques my interest in May 22^nd is the fact that it’s also World Goth Day. Yes, it’s that date in the calendar when we celebrate Goth, the world’s most black-clad, most kohl-eyeliner-rimmed, most sunlight-adverse musical sub-culture. Today even has its own Goth-themed logo, designed by the fabulously-named BatBoy Slim.

To mark the occasion, here are links to a dozen of my favourite Goth tunes on YouTube. My apologies if, first, you have to sit through a few of those annoying and asinine adverts that nowadays seem to clog the channel like fatbergs in a London sewer. .

To start with, here’s one of the genre’s most old-school bands, Fields of the Nephilim, with their 1987 anthem Moonchild – I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Moonchild is also the name of a novel that occult icon and self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley had penned 70 years earlier. With the sepulchral voice of singer Carl McCoy and the band’s peculiar look – moth-eaten Wild West gunslingers covered in flour – I thought Fields of the Nephilim were a bit of joke during their 1980s heyday, but I have to say they’ve grown on me since then and I find Moonchild and its lyrical refrain (“Moonchild, lower me down, lower me down / Moonchild…. Lower me down, down, down, down, down, dowww-wwwn!”) irresistible.

© Situation Two

Also defiantly old-school in sound, but of a more recent vintage – it was originally released in 2006 – is Tear You Apart by Californian band She Wants Revenge. Like many people, I hadn’t heard the song before it was used in a 2015 episode of the TV show American Horror Story (apparently at the insistence of Lady Gaga, who featured among the cast). When I did hear it, with its cheeky emulation of the dub-style guitar sound from Bauhaus’s 1982 epic Bela Lugosi’s Dead, and its titular homage to Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980) by Joy Division, I genuinely believed for a moment this was a 35-year-old Goth classic that’d somehow eluded me since the 1980s.

Another band hailing from California is London After Midnight, who no doubt took their name from the long-lost 1927 silent vampire film London After Midnight, which starred Lon Chaney Sr. In a genre where too often songs lapse into pompous, overblown melodrama, their 1992 song Sacrifice manages the difficult trick of being stately and melodramatic – check out that thunder in the background – while being rather sweet and jaunty as well.

© Rotation

Now for a classic from the early 1980s and the nascent years of Goth music: 1982’s Torch by Soft Cell. The Soft Cell duo of Marc Almond and Dave Ball would probably hate to see themselves categorised as ‘Goth’ and have one of their songs included in a playlist like this, but their sound – and especially the gorgeous trumpet-synth sound featured here – has always, for me, evoked the scene’s candlelit melancholia. Incidentally, when the pair of them were interviewed in the Guardian earlier this month, Almond made a memorable observation about how old age suddenly sneaks up on you: “One day you’re smearing your naked body in cat food at art college, the next you’re choosing terracotta pots at the garden centre.” Yes, Marc, I wholly agree. Not that I ever smeared my naked body in cat food at art college, though.

And here’s another synth-orientated duo. In 2011 Light Asylum consisted of Brooklyn singer Shannon Funchess and keyboardist Bruno Coviello – the latter departed shortly afterwards – and I found this clip of them on YouTube performing their song Dark Allies live at the time. Funchess’s barnstorming vocal performance is amazing. It’s just a pity that the audience seem as animated and appreciative as an army of arthritic zombies.

Still keeping with synth-y musical outfits… Despite the death of founding member Andy Fletcher in 2022, the veteran Basildon band Depeche Mode have a new album, Momento Mori, out this year and, like Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13^th movies, seem unkillable. I’m partial to this remix – the ‘Headcleanr Rock Mix’ – of their song Nothing from the 1987 album Music for the Masses. The Rock Mix takes out much of the original’s synth sound and replaces it with one that’s, well, rocky. It also plays up the song’s ‘Woo-woo!’ backing vocals and the result is like an up-tempo version of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (1968).

© Mute

Goth icon Nick Cave received some flak this month for being part of the Australian delegation that attended the coronation ceremony of King Charles III. When challenged about this on his website The Red Hand Files, Nick declared an admiration for the House of Windsor, stating that the late Queen Elizabeth II “seemed almost extra-terrestrial and was the most charming woman I have ever met.” This from someone who once duetted with P.J. Harvey? Wow! Nick must have found Queen Liz powerful stuff indeed. He also answered the question, “What would the young Nick Cave have thought of that?” by saying: “…well, the young Nick Cave was, in all due respect to the young Nick Cave, young, and like many young people, mostly demented, so I’m a little cautious about using him as a benchmark for what I should or should not do.”

In fact, I wouldn’t have minded Cave attending the coronation if he’d brought his band the Bad Seeds along with him and they’d been allowed to perform my all-time favourite Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds number Stagger Lee, which is the next song on my list. (In the Stagger Lee video, Nick looks scary even while wearing a pink T-shirt.) Yes, the coronation would have been a much livelier affair if, instead of Handel’s Zadok the Priest, Westminster Abbey had resounded to Nick Cave hollering about slobbering on someone’s head and climbing over pussies to get to ‘one fat boy’s asshole’. And having Blixa Bargeld shrieking animalistically at the moment that Charles got crowned would have worked perfectly.

There was never much chance of Robert Smith, frontman and mainstay of the Cure, getting invited to the coronation. Not as he once said of the Royal Family, “I’m much better than them. They’ve never done anything. They’re f**king idiots.” Anyway, here’s footage of the glorious Mr Smith performing, not with the Cure, but as a collaborator with the Canadian band Crystal Castles in 2010. They’re doing a cover of the song Not in Love, originally recorded by another Canadian outfit, Platinum Blonde, in 1983.

From indy100.com

I don’t know why I like this cover of the 1968 Yardbirds number Heart Full of Soul by the Goth band Ghost Dance – who were formed in 1985 by Gary Marx (late of the Sisters of Mercy) and Anne-Marie Hurst (late of Skeletal Family), and who disbanded in 1989, but who have recently reformed again. I just do. It’s a joyous-sounding thing.

Not normally joyous is the sound of Goth / industrial-rock juggernaut Killing Joke, whose mission according to singer and keyboardist Jaz Coleman was to “define the exquisite beauty of the atomic age in terms of style, sound and form”. Actually, the band’s crunching, thunderous urgency rarely sounded ‘exquisite’ or ‘beautiful’, but it was pretty impressive. Here’s a track I like very much from their eponymous 2003 album. It’s called Asteroid and features Coleman screeching the blunt but memorable refrain, “Asteroid…! Coming in from the void!” The hectic drums are courtesy of a guest artist, Nirvana and the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl. Killing Joke had once accused Nirvana of plagiarism because of the similarity of the guitar riff in Nirvana’s Come as You Are (1991) to the one in their 1985 song Eighties, so clearly there were no hard feelings between them and Grohl.

© Zuma / Epic / Columbia

Idiosyncratic Birkenhead indie-rock troubadours Half Man Half Biscuit could in no way be described as ‘Goth’, but their 2000 song With Goth on our Side not only takes the mickey out of a certain Bob Dylan effort, but also pokes affectionate fun at music’s darkest subculture with its tale of Dai Young, who’s ‘the king of Welsh Goths’, and his girlfriend: “She sits and she crimps / Her mother’s convinced / She’s communing with imps.” The girlfriend also has a kid brother called Wilf, who’s all right because ‘he’s into Placebo and Cradle of Filth’.

And to call the curtain on World Goth Day 2023, here’s Cities in Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees, the stand-out track on their 1986 album Tinderbox – which, incidentally, was the first album by the band that I ever bought. Needless to say, I hold Siouxsie Sioux in high regard. Indeed, if Nick Cave believes Queen Elizabeth II is the most extra-terrestrial and most charismatic woman he’s ever met, well, I can only surmise that he’s never met Her Gothic Highness, the majestic and imperious Siouxsie.

© Polydor / Geffen

September 18, 2022October 24, 2022

It’s all gone J.G.

© Fay Godwin / The Paris Review

Recent events have inspired me to update and repost this, which first appeared on this blog in 2019, on the tenth anniversary of J.G. Ballard’s death.

The visionary writer James Graham Ballard, known to his readers as ‘J.G.’, officially succumbed to prostate cancer and ceased to be a presence in our universe in April 2009. However, the past 13 years have been so baroquely and surreally insane that at times I’ve had a troubling thought. In 2009, did Ballard cease to exist in the universe or did the reverse happen? Did the universe stop existing as a physical entity at that moment and, since then, has it continued only as a figment of J.G. Ballard’s imagination?

Could we be living now as ghosts in Ballard’s fiction without realising it?

Recent historical trends have suggested this is not merely a crazy hypothesis on my part. The fact that people are finally talking seriously about the dire threat to human civilisation posed by global warming – talking seriously but, alas, still doing very little about it – makes me think of Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World, where climate change has jacked up the temperatures, melted the ice caps, inundated London with water and turned the city into a balmy and hallucinogenic landscape of lagoons and tropical flora and fauna; or the following year’s novel with the self-explanatory title The Drought; or his 1961 short story Deep End, where ‘oxygen mining’ has drained the oceans and a few remaining humans skulk around their dried-out beds at night-time, when the heat and radiation levels aren’t as lethal as they are in the daytime.

Meanwhile, our ever-spiralling-out-of-control and ecologically suicidal dependency on the internal combustion engine, and the social maladies (like road rage) that go with it, make me think of 1973’s Crash – the initial manuscript of which caused one publisher’s reader to splutter, “This author is beyond psychiatric help.” Whereas the increasing fragmentation of society through the proliferation of social media platforms and devices brings to mind Ballard’s short story The Intensive Care Unit, which turned up in the 1982 collection Myths of the Near Future and contained the prophetic line, “All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.” And the tendency among the elite to shut themselves off in gated communities, where they not only relax, play and sleep but also, increasingly, work, evokes such novels as 1975’s High Rise and 2000’s Super-Cannes – where in both cases the set-up memorably ends in tears.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

More generally, spending a few minutes channel-surfing through TV’s 24/7 news outlets is enough to make you feel you’re inhabiting Ballard’s experimental, narrative-less collage of ‘condensed novels’, 1970’s aptly-titled The Atrocity Exhibition. And the sorry state of America, where the now openly authoritarian Republican Party could easily win the presidency in 2024 and return Donald Trump to the White House, reminds me of his 1981 novel Hello America, which has an ecologically devastated USA run by someone calling himself ‘President Charles Manson’.

And as I witness the madness of Brexit in the UK, facilitated by a cadre of rich, privately-educated posh-boys like Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson, I can think of half-a-dozen Ballard stories that have rich, privately-educated Britishers losing their marbles, becoming unhinged and embracing chaos and catastrophe.

Indeed, events in the UK at the moment, with all of its media, most of its politicians and a large part of its public indulging in near-deranged displays of grief over the death of a 96-year-old lady worth something between 370 and 500 million pounds while the country totters into a potentially disastrous cost-of-living crisis, are all very ‘Ballardian’. ‘The Queue’ – the term applied to the line of mourners spending 24 hours shuffling across ten kilometres of London in order to view the Queen’s coffin at Westminster Abbey – could easily have been the title, and plot-premise, of one of Ballard’s novels or short stories. Meanwhile, the much-publicised behaviour of the Centre Parcs holiday-villages company, which first tried to evict its vacationing residents on the day of the Queen’s funeral, then relented but warned them to stay inside their lodges on the day, prompted author Paul McAuley to send out a tweet slightly rephrasing Ballard’s most famous opening sentence, the one that kicked off High Rise: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this Centre Parcs village the previous three months.”

Occasionally, the idea that we could be living unawares in a giant virtual-reality system dreamed into existence by J.G. Ballard strikes me on a personal level. For example, while I was living in Tunisia just after the 2011 revolution and the advent of the so-called Arab Spring, I arranged one afternoon to meet up with friends in Carthage, the swankiest of Tunis’s suburbs. My friends hadn’t appeared yet when I got off at the TCM station, next door to Carthage’s branch of the French supermarket-chain Monoprix. So, I waited there and passed the time by reading a few pages of Ballard’s final novel, 2006’s Kingdom Come. It took me a minute to notice that the Monoprix was closed. And not just closed. During the revolution, it’d been trashed and looted and left a razed shell. Its ruins looked sinisterly incongruous in the middle of this plush neighbourhood of high white walls and thick iron gates, four-by-fours and swimming pools, orange trees and jasmine plants. And what was Kingdom Come about? A community succumbing to dystopian chaos thanks to the arrival of a fancy new shopping centre.

It’s been claimed that Ballard’s writing wasn’t influenced so much by other fiction (except perhaps that of William S. Burroughs) as by visual forces like surrealism and Dadaism and the ‘media landscape’ of modern-day advertising and consumerism. But I have to say I find him a very traditional author in some ways. Reality may be crumbling around the edges of his scenarios, but at the same time he shows an admirable commitment to telling a gripping, old-fashioned yarn. Stiff-upper-lipped British types – emotionally-repressed, able only to address each other by their surnames as if they were still back at boarding school – have adventures in exotic locales while they try to do the right thing, though as some hallucinogenic apocalypse unfolds and madness leaks into their thought processes, they invariably end up doing the wrong thing.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

Ballard’s work calls to mind – my mind, anyway – the work of another storyteller not adverse to spicing his highbrow themes with derring-do and intrigue, Graham Greene. Indeed, I’ve sometimes thought of Greene as a mirror image of Ballard. That’s with Greene in the real world, though, posing before a fairground mirror and with Ballard as his warped, twisted reflection. While Greene’s characters are usually tortured by Catholicism, Ballard’s usually have to contend with creeping and finally overwhelming psychosis.

And besides Greene, another literary influence on Ballard is surely Joseph Conrad. I wouldn’t say Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) lurks in the DNA of every Ballard story, but a good many of them feature darkness of some form and, yes, a character who feels duty-bound to journey into the heart of it. When I was in my mid-teens, the first book by Ballard I ever read was his short-story collection The Terminal Beach (1964) and its opening story, A Question of Re-entry, begins with these deliciously Conradian lines: “All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed, and by two o’clock had covered some 75 miles… Now and then the channel would widen into a flat expanse of what appeared to be stationary water, the slow oily swells which disturbed its surface transforming it into a sluggish mirror of the distant, enigmatic sky, the islands of rotten balsa logs refracted by the layers of haze like the drifting archipelagos of a dream. Then the channel would narrow again and the cooling jungle darkness enveloped the launch.”

Those introductory lines so captivated me that, from that moment on, I was completely hooked on Ballard’s work.

Now, 40 years later, I still haven’t quite read everything by him. For the record, though, here are my favourite things among what I have read. Among his novels, The Drowned World, Crash, High Rise, Hello America, Empire of the Sun (1984) and Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Good though his novels are, I think his short fiction is even better. Picking a favourite dozen from his short stories is a near-impossible task, but I’ll have a go. Off the top of my head, I would nominate A Question of Re-entry, Deep End, The Illuminated Man – later expanded into the 1966 novel The Crystal World – and The Drowned Giant from The Terminal Beach; Chronopolis, The Garden of Time and The Watch Towers from the collection The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963); Concentration City and Now Wakes the Sea from The Disaster Area (1967); The Smile from Myths of the Near Future; and The Enormous Space and The Air Disaster from War Fever (1990).

Meanwhile, of his 19 novels, I have yet to read 1961’s The Wind from Nowhere, 1988’s Running Wild and 1996’s Cocaine Nights. And there’s at least one of his short story collections, 1976’s Low-Flying Aircraft, that I haven’t read either. Which is good. I might be an old git now, but I’m glad that reading some new stuff by J.G. Ballard is still one of the things I can look forward to in life.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

September 11, 2022September 12, 2022

London Bridge is down

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

London Bridge is down. No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler. I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor. Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8^th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog. Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

That’s been my view for most of my life. Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.” This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed. Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions. This included the abolition of its monarchy.

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me. Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’. Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery. Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past. Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century. I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media. One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members. Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids. Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus. And who can blame him? If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit. Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much. Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this. They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.” Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with. In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.” Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then. And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country. This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something. Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.” Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country. Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge. The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this. Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go. That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history. She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one. She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years. Quite the reverse. By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days. Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8^th.

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away. When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine. (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them. The crowd went, “Hurrah!” Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface. While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag. The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again. Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

June 12, 2022June 13, 2022

Grovel, Britannia

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70^th year of her reign on the British throne. I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family. It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them. They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward. Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper. It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy. This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run. And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long. She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police. The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy. That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down. The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain? Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

That was then, however. Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

Now I just want the whole thing gone. Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me. My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein. (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19. Aye, right.) It’s more to do with the state of Britain. The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past. Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment. The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government. I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s. In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies. There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’. Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have. It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on. It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society. Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever. This is never more obvious than in the country’s press. British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen. Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.” No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are. She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone. Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them. But obviously, that isn’t going to happen. The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly. And as for the country they’re supposed to represent… Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.

August 14, 2020August 17, 2020

Flash… Ah, feck off

Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if I’m the only person who’s still sane in a world that’s gone mad. And this time what makes me feel that everyone else has lost their marbles is the amount of praise and adulation being heaped on Mike Hodges’ sci-fi / comic-book movie Flash Gordon at the moment – this being both the 40^th anniversary of its original release in 1980 and the occasion of its re-release on modern-day streaming platforms.

In the Guardian recently Peter Bradshaw awarded it four out five stars, hailed it for its supposed expressionism (its ‘operatic theme’, its ‘bizarre 2D studio sets’ and its ‘eyeball-frazzling colour scheme’) and made a somewhat dubious claim that it’d inspired ‘every 21^st-century Marvel movie’. Meanwhile, the Standard’s Charlotte O’Sullivan also gave it four out of five stars and described it as a ‘marvellously terrible romp’ – well, in my opinion, you could argue that she was half right there. And the venerable sci-fi / fantasy media magazine Starburst recently published a list of the best 80 sci-fi / fantasy movies of the 1980s, in which Flash Gordon was placed ahead of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1986), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1980) and Brazil (1985).

The sound you hear is the sound of my teeth grinding.

I’ll be blunt. I thought Flash Gordon was rubbish when it came out in 1980 and 40 years later, despite what often happens when you have both the benefit of hindsight and the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, I still think it’s rubbish. The beef I have with the film is that it makes a joke of its two sources of inspiration, the Flash Gordon comic strip created by Alex Raymond in 1934 and the three movie serials based on the strip and starring Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe that were made in 1936, 1938 and 1940. Tasked with putting Flash Gordon onto the big screen in 1980, the filmmakers took the easy route of playing the character for laughs.

This is regrettable because during the same period other filmmakers took their inspiration from similar old comic strips and movie serials but made an effort to adapt them into films that, while poking some knowing fun at their subject matter, did so in an affectionate and proportionate way and were still mightily entertaining at the end of the day. I’m thinking here of the first two Superman films (1978 and 80) with Christopher Reeve and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980). In fact, those films remind me of something Mark Gatiss once said about Billy Wilder’s mildly tongue-in-cheek 1970 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes: that it gently takes ‘the mickey out of Sherlock Holmes in the way you can only do with something that you really adore.’

There wasn’t much evidence that Flash Gordon’s producer, the old-school Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis, adored or, indeed, knew anything about the original comic strip and movie serials. However, Flash‘s fate was sealed when old Dino – who, thanks to a CV that included Death Wish (1974), King Kong (1976), Orca: Killer Whale (1977), Amityville II and 3-D (1982 and 83), Dune (1984) and Maximum Overdrive (1985), was known in some quarters as ‘Dino Di Horrendous’ – signed scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr onto the project. Semple Jr was responsible for the 1966-68 TV version of Batman, which had sent up the Caped Crusader in an extremely camp fashion. Incidentally, I’m not using ‘camp’ here in the 1909 Oxford English Dictionary definition of it, as meaning ‘ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, effeminate or homosexual’. No, I’m using ‘camp’ in its simpler meaning of ‘so bad it’s good’.

This camp approach meant that the Batman TV show was ridiculous, but with the intention that kids wouldn’t recognise the ridiculousness and would merely enjoy the derring-do, while adults would recognise it and would have a good time laughing at it. Hence, ‘so bad it’s good’.

(Ironically, most films that are regarded as classic entries in the ‘so bad they’re good’ category, from Ed Wood’s oeuvre in the 1950’s to Tommy Wiseau’s epic 2003 clunker The Room, were actually intended to be proper, serious movies. They were never meant to be bad, but ended up so because of their makers’ entertaining incompetence.)

I assume it’s largely because of Lorenzo Semple Jr that Flash Gordon turned out the way it did. Mind you, Dino already had form in the camp stakes for in 1968 he’d produced sci-fi / fantasy movie Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim and based on the comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest. With its baroque sets, garish costumes and lurid skyscapes, it’s obviously a visual influence on the later Flash Gordon, but it also blazes a trail by being intentionally and supposedly-hilariously silly. I have to say I find Barbarella excruciating. It’s painfully unfunny in nearly all its parts and also grotesquely sexist, with Vadim’s camera leering over the naked and near-naked flesh of its star (and Vadim’s then wife) Jane Fonda. Plus it’s imbued with an irritating swinging-sixties smugness that makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.

I don’t think Flash Gordon is as bad as Barbarella, but when I saw it as a teenager, and any time I saw bits of it on TV afterwards, I always found it a grim experience. It’s depressing how scenes that were meant to have the viewer chuckling at the glorious silliness of everything just left me cringing. The worst moment is when Flash (Sam Jones) takes on a squad of red-armoured goons employed by the villainous Emperor Ming (Max Von Sydow) in a brawl in Ming’s throne-room that morphs into an American football match. Flash and Professor Zarkov (Topol) pass a ball-sized metal orb between them, Flash charges into the goons and scatters them like ninepins, and Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) does a cheerleading routine (“Go, Flash, go!”) on the side. Oh, and any time a goon gets too close to the delegation of Hawkmen led by Prince Vultan (Brian Blessed), Vultan goes, “Ho-ho-ho!” and bonks the goon on the head with his metal staff. Funny, eh? Well…

I’m not blaming the director Mike Hodges, who was responsible for the gritty British crime classic Get Carter (1970). I assume that with Flash Gordon, for reasons of his own sanity, Hodges just pointed his cameras in the right direction and didn’t think too much about what was ending up in the can. However, I wonder what might have happened if the visionary director Nicolas Roeg, who’d originally been signed to make Flash Gordon and had spent a year working on its pre-production, had actually been given a chance to direct it. The results might have been astonishing… But on the other hand, considering how another big sci-fi collaboration between Dino De Laurentiis and a visionary director, David Lynch, created the turgid shambles that was Dune (1984), I suppose the Dino-produced, Roeg-directed Flash Gordon could have been shite too.

I’ll stop the Dino-bashing for a moment to point out that he did subsequently produce Lynch’s excellent Blue Velvet. Credit where it’s due and all that.

To be fair, Flash Gordon does have a few good scenes, for example, when Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton) forces Flash to stick his arm into a hollow tree-stump that’s infested with poisonous alien creepy-crawlies, or when Vultan forces Flash and Barin to fight each other on a platform that has lethal spikes popping out of it at random places and at random moments. The latter scene was choreographed by the late, legendary fight arranger William Hobbs. it’s telling, though, that these good bits are ones that are played straight rather than for laughs.

And although I can’t say the central performances of Sam Jones, Melody Anderson and Topol made much impression on me, I’ll happily praise the efforts of the supporting cast – Von Sydow, Dalton, Omella Muti as Princess Aura, the splendidly silky Peter Wyngarde as Ming’s sidekick Klytus. Also, a number of familiar faces make welcome appearances in smaller roles, such as playwright and occasional actor John Osborne (who played the key villain in Get Carter), sinewy character actor John Hallam (who wasn’t in Get Carter but was in a lot of other British crime movies at the time, like 1971’s Villain, 1973’s The Offence and 1975’s Hennessey), and Richard O’Brien, who co-created The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976).

Of course, one performance in Flash Gordon that’s memorable, if not exactly noted for its subtlety, is that of Brian Blessed as the Hawkmen’s leader Prince Vultan. As portrayed by Blessed, Vultan is half-Viking, half-turkey, and 100% pure ham. I wonder if Blessed regrets attacking the role with such exuberance. He must get fed up nowadays, 40 years after the event, when people still approach him and ask him to recite, or more accurately bellow, his most famous line in the film: “GORDON’S ALIVE!” Indeed, if you’re to believe Blessed, no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth II once asked him to shout the line for her royal pleasure.

While I marvel at the unfathomable love people feel for this dire film, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by another thing that Blessed has claimed about the Queen. Apparently, she’s told him that Flash Gordon is her favourite movie and she makes a point of watching it with her grandchildren every Christmas. In other words, in Britain at least, the Flash Gordon rot extends right to the top.