TV
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A bit more of this, a bit more of that
A little bit of art… Alan Moore is done with comic books. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.
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From Hare to Fraternité
A very good essay by David Hare on Tory shamelessness and the 1970s TV show “Road to Freedom.” Shame, said Karl Marx, is the only revolutionary emotion. When the series climaxes with the capitulation of the French army to the Nazis in 1940, one of the greatest humiliations of modern history, you realise how refreshing it is, after years of propaganda in which people are constantly exhorted to go easy on themselves, to watch fiction in which anguish and self-reproach are finally admitted to exist and to govern our behaviour… our whole society finds itself asking
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Rumpole on America
From Episode S01E03 (“Rumpole and the Honorable Member”) Oh, there is something you’ll have to be very careful of in America, Nick… The hygiene. Oh, it can be most awfully dangerous. The purity. The grim determination not to adulterate anything. Well, cheers.” Can be found here – at least for now (Also – note to self – Peter Kittle – Thatcher’s institutions: Hegemony and national identity in popular British fiction Chapter 4 – The Law of Empire: Rumpole and the Postcolonial Prerogative)