The moving finger rants

My preferred serve at the moment is—no really, trust me on this—whisky and cream soda. Get yourself a nice smoky Islay blend (Black Bottle is good, plus the purchase of it pisses off Donald Trump; Islay Mist is far superior if you can find it), pack an old-fashioned glass with plenty of ice, and add cream soda. Since I am a posh New Town bastard these days, none of the supermarkets round here sell cream soda. I have to walk for twenty minutes before I can get to the grotty kind of store that has a proper shelf full of Barr's products. It is worth the walk.

There is a commonly held belief that one shouldn't add mixers to single malts. This view is incorrect. You still shouldn't, ever, add mixer to single malts, unless you have a really good reason, which I often do. In defiance of this naive view, I have tried the same pour with Smokehead. Smokehead is a single malt (Scuttlebutt has it that it's a seven-year-old vatted Ardbeg with a dash of 10yo), but it still doesn't work as well in this serve as Islay Mist, which is a bloody fantastic drop for a blend, and cheap too, if you can find it.

Limited Edition, single cask, Ximenez finish cask strength 1996 Ben Riach: bloody marvellous. This is the bottle I was saving for when Maggie died, and now I finally have something for which I should thank the horrendous old bitch. Worth waiting for. Not a lot of point in my reviewing this, since most of you will never get to drink any. I have bottle no. 112 of 310, and this one's not coming round again. But nonetheless: bloody marvellous. Tart apple, hint of stewed raisins, and strong acetone on the nose; incredibly sticky mouthfeel, with a touch of burnt golden syrup on the palate; lighter notes and the sherry and oak all come out when you add a drop of water. The concentrated essence of apfelstrudel in a glass. Bloody beautiful. Thanks, Mags. Please feel free to die again any time you like.

Now, who's up for clubbing together to buy a cask of something nice, so that we may drink it when Gideon Osborne is finally deservingly assassinated?

I had a whisky recently that tasted exactly like Scarlett Johansson. I'm not kidding, that's what it tasted like. Or possibly it tasted like how she looks. Unfortunately I can't remember anything else about it, not even the whisky's name, or how it could possibly taste like that, or how I would know. Must have been a good one.

Many of you will know of my fondness for Lidl's finest Ben Bracken single malt. Lovely fresh vanilla cream notes, hint of lemon sherrrrbert, and it's about eighteen quid a bottle. Scuttlebutt has it that it's the last expression from the mothballed Tamnavulin distillery, but if that's true then I'm not sure where they're still getting the stuff from, since Tamnavulin reopened in 2007.

Vaguely related, today's find has been Aldi's finest, Glen Marnoch 12yo Highland single malt. There's no such place as Glen Marnoch and Internet is suspiciously silent on where this stuff came from. It's spent some time in a sherry cask, without question. Dry white pepper and old wizened cinnamon sticks on the nose. Packed full of fresh fruits—watermelon, guava, tropical fruit salad—citrus, and a warm welcoming sherry length to it. Nice long smoky finish with a little ethanol kick at the end. And the whole thing comes in at under twenty quid.

I'm starting to like Aldi. Their weinerschnitzel is good too.

It's okay, Moff. Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.

(I didn't know it was possible to hold one's breath for forty-five minutes.)

Yes, Prime Minister
The King's Theatre (run ended)

It takes massive balls to follow in the footsteps of Nigel Hawthorne. Now I know why Group Captain Gilmore's men call him ‘Chunky’.

A touring stage show of a twenty-year-old political satire? That's never going to work, surely? Well... yes and no, Minister. Original series writers Anthony Jay and Jonathyn Lynn deliver the same crackling character-driven dialogue as before, and it is wonderful to behold. But occasionally—just occasionally, mark you—it becomes apparent that the state of political satire has moved on since the 1980s, and Jay and Lynn may have failed to move with it.

It's Chris Morris' fault, of course. There's only one man who can make child prostitution funny, or Anglo-Arab relations in a world beset by Islamic terrorism (and even he can only do it when Armando Iannucci is producing). During the 1980s it was possible to make a gentle comedy of manners about the terrible things that happen in politics: now it's necessary to refer to the the giant elephant in the room about illegal wars and thousands of needless deaths. A proper satire should skate along the uncomfortable, but this crossed the personal line of everyone I spoke to. It's brave to make the attempt, but it shouldn't be surprising that the show is most successful when it more closely emulates the original series.

Let's talk acting. Characterizations range from absolutely bang spot-on (the aforementioned massively-genitalled Simon Williams as Sir Humphrey) to bloody good with certain caveats (an interesting choice by Chris Larkin to play Bernard as much less hesitant and impressionable than the Bernard we're familiar with). Richard McCabe deftly navigates a narrow corridor between the Jim Hacker of old and that oleaginous fuckface we're currently lumbered with as the (sadly real, non-fictional) Prime Minister. (I wonder how much of a problem this was for Paul Eddington: navigating between his own character and Maggie.) Charlotte Lucas excellently plays a competent policy advisor to Hacker's PM, but alas she's given the sort of character who, like Frank Weisel in Yes, Minister or Dorothy Wainwright in Yes, Prime Minister, would be quietly dropped after a few episodes for lack of anything interesting to do.

On which note: the plot. It would fill a half-hour episode or even a newfangled fifty-minute episode very neatly, but at two hours it tries to do too much. Entire scenes and at least one character could be excised: the BBC Director-General appears for a while to bluster about government interference in broadcasting—clearly one of Jay and Lynn's pet subjects, given the number of times that identical dialogue appeared in the TV series—and to agree to an interview that forms the climactic scene of the play, which could alternatively have been arranged by a single line of conversation somewhere. It's important to pile multifarious and myriad pressures upon our beleaguered PM for the surprisingly effective payoff in the second act when it all degenerates, or rather develops, into farce: but it could have been done more tightly. And as observed above, there are some lines you don't cross in light comedy. Child prostitution, sex trafficking and the mounting death toll in Afghanistan are three off the top of my head. Had the play not deliberately and with malice aforethought crossed those three lines in succession, it would have been the length it deserved.

As a revival show for a well-loved cult comedy, even one with a few contemporary jokes thrown in, it's brilliant. As a current satire, sadly, it fails. As a feature-length pilot for a new series?... I'd commission it, but I'd keep a close eye on it for improvements.

I've had my obligatory obscure Doctor Who reference for this post, so this one's a free bonus. Watching this was just like the TV Movie. It was glorious to have it back just for one evening, but still it wasn't quite right.

I don't do Christmas. I don't. But if we must have Christmas specials, let's have them be like that one.

In summary, then: EEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEE.

~

I totally owned this pheasant that I roasted today. I was expecting problems, but there weren't any. Pheasant is supposed to be a difficult bird—dry, traditionally—but this was the moistest, most delicious pheasant that you lot have never eaten. Not bad for a first try.

That's right, I'm cooking pheasant now. Pheasants. Are. Cool.

Today I was accosted by a black-market delicatessen. Ratty-looking bloke pulls me aside as I'm leaving the supermarket, asks me if I'm looking forward to Christmas. (The answer, as ever, is no.) He offers me all manner of otherworldly festive delights. I am resistant. He suggests I might like to buy something for the Missis. While he's talking, a packet of corned beef falls out of his jacket.

You're selling me corned beef for Christmas? Happy Yuletide, Darling. I bought you this token of my affection from a dodgy man at the bus stop.

Vaguely related: yesterday in the Scotsman there was a letter complaining that the letters complaining that Christmas starts earlier every year are starting earlier every year. I am tempted to take this further opportunity to determine the depth of the Scotsman's call stack.

~

(Ever the voice of reason, scotm informs me that Brassed Off wasn't made until four years after Alien³, so such an elevator pitch is unlikely. The solution is obvious: David Fincher travelled back in time after seeing Brassed Off to pitch Alien³ to Fox. The residual time-dilation effects are why the film runs so slowly.)

The dramatic possibilities of grimdark Brassed Off in space, with gore are legion, and were totally neglected in Alien³. I think it's time we explored this vision now.

Disaster strikes tightly-knit community of the mining planet of Sheffield-426. The colliery has been shut down because of the xenomorph attacks. Destitution is rife; also, eviscerated corpses are everywhere. There's a comic-relief mortuary worker who's the only person still in employment. Fortunately, the Space Miners rediscover their spirit—and perhaps even a little romance—when they find they can defeat the alien with the power of SONG! Pom, pom, parp.

It's scared of fire! Quickly, play the trumpet section from The Crazy World of Arthur Brown!

I wanna introduce you to a personal friend of mine. This is an M41A Space Tuba, with over- and under-mounted thirty-millimeter trombones.

In Space, nobody can hear you do the glissando from the Wallace and Gromit theme.

I think I've figured out where Alien³ went wrong. In the first film, it crept around killing people. In the second film, it turned lights on and off, so it could operate simple machinery. The aliens were getting smarter. In the third film, the alien kills off all the characters in descending order of interestingness, leaving it a bloody mess full of insipid redshirts by the half-way point. Thus, the xenomorph provides literary critique on the script of the film itself. Presumably, by Alien Resurrection, the alien has become intelligent enough to write fart jokes into new episodes of Doctor Who.

Frisky and Mannish were amazing, as ever. It being the finale for the School of Pop, it was a little melancholy, too. Still, The College Years is still on, and if anything it's better. Edinburgh people: go.

(Here's the trailer in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Then: stargazing! It was cloudy. We saw a single Perseid. One lousy meteor. It was a bloody good one though; a big chunky one with a trail of smoke following it, looking like the shooting stars you get in cartoons. Lovely.

Thus, since astronomy was a bit of a washout, I leave you with a snippet of medieval history:

Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror (known as William the Bastard before 1066), instigated his first insurrection against his father in 1077, aged about 24, when his younger brothers emptied a chamberpot over his head. Apparently they'd grown bored of playing at dice and decided that this would be a good way to liven up a dull afternoon. Yeah, and you laugh at what Harry gets up to in the tabloids these days.

Angry that William failed to punish his brothers sufficiently, Robert rode forth the next day and attempted to capture the castle at Rouen. Like you do. It didn't go well. Basically it's not a good idea to pick a fight with a man called the Conqueror, especially not if that man is also called the Bastard, and especially not if that man is also your dad. (Rumours that one of Duke William's other names was Lord Will-spank-the-shit-out-of-you-when-I-get-you-home remain unconfirmed.)

Anyway, bottom line, Robert didn't get to be King after William died. We got William II instead. On such matters as that tenth-century pisspot do the fates of empires turn.

(Lord Will-spank-the-shit-out-of-you-when-I-get-you-home would make an excellent character on Knightmare.)

A+++++++, would do the Time Warp again.

Significantly less impressed with this one.

Aside from that utterly objectionable piece of bullshit, a mildly amusing breather between an emotionally heavy episode and the season finale, which I assume will be likewise. Distinctly average at best, and especially compared to the rest of the season, rates no more than a ‘meh’. I do hope that they show some actual Doctor Who next week.

Half a star for the soundtrack alone.

(See, it's of Azkaban because it had Dobby in it. ( Which just raises further questions: )

It was inevitable that an episode entitled Amy's Choice was going to be at least somewhat feminist in tone, but about halfway through, I started to wonder if it was really feminist or just a male scriptwriter who Doesn't Get It trying to be feminist. So I spoke to some women, and we came up with an interpretation with greater nuance.

It's really coming to something when I have to pull out my old Jung books in order to write a post about Doctor Who. Childrens' fuckin show, is it?