Dear Sirs,

I have seen the Banzai Christmas Special.  I’ve watched a couple of episodes of Dirty Sanchez late of an evening when I couldn’t sleep.  In my teens, before the prevalence of the internet, I even watched a bit of Eurotrash.  I tell you this to establish my credentials in having sampled some pretty stupid television aired on Channel 4.  Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the sheer catastrophic idiocy that was The Execution of Gary Glitter.

I’m going to say that title again: The Execution of Gary Glitter.  A fictional documentary-style account of what might have happened if UK law were implausibly modified to allow Gary Glitter (real name Paul Gadd) to be executed, ostensibly for sex crimes committed in another country but essentially for the crime of being Gary Glitter.

I have two major issues with The Execution of Gary Glitter, upon which I will now expound for your delight and convenience.

My first issue is that The Execution of Gary Glitter ghoulishly constructs a completely imaginary framework in which a real living person can be fictionally tried, convicted and executed for committing a hideous crime in a way that the real world simply won’t support.  Under normal circumstances this would be considered defamation of character.  The fact that Gary Glitter is an international multiply-convicted sex offender doesn’t leave him with a lot of character left to defame, but that doesn’t excuse the practise.

This would be just about excusable if The Execution of Gary Glitter were presented as a piece of satire, which has an implicit agreement with the audience that it is distorting fact to a ridiculous degree for entertainment purposes.  The Execution of Gary Glitter, however, is not satire.  The Execution of Gary Glitter presents itself as a serious, thought-provoking, counterfactual look at how we view the death penalty and sex crimes through the medium of Gary Glitter.  In doing so, it lends itself an air of credibility which it simply cannot substantiate.

This brings me on to my second major issue with The Execution of Gary Glitter.  Sex crimes (especially those dealing with minors) and the death penalty are sensitive subjects with complex social and legal consequences, which deserve to be aired, discussed, debated and explored in a forum respectful of this sensitivity and complexity.  The Execution of Gary Glitter is not such a forum, and in trivialising such subjects it stunts public discourse around them.

I believe that The Execution of Gary Glitter serves to promote public misunderstanding of these issues, primarily by being absurd.  There’s no more adequate a word to describe The Execution of Gary Glitter.  It is an absurd premise, underpinned by absurd contrivances in an absurd hypothetical situation.  There are reasons why we can’t hang Gary Glitter, but rather than explore these reasons, The Execution of Gary Glitter simply ignores them for the sake of perverse fantasy wish fulfillment.

Kind regards,
Mr. Own Devices

What struck me most following this event was the sheer ghoulish conjecture over whether or not she would die as a result of simply having swallowed an insect.  I have no doubt this contributed to the maddening compulsion that would eventually overtake her.  If she’d left it there I’m sure she would still be with us today, but the speculation over her physical disposition clearly had a pervasive effect on her sense of wellbeing.

What drives people to cyclical self-destructive behaviour?  I certainly can’t claim to be an expert.  The human brain is a wonderful and terrifying construct, fraught with valuable processes that can do great harm in the wrong context.  A logical and internally-consistent idea, left unchecked, can rapidly expand beyond our ability to mediate it.  I believe this was at the root of the distressing events which overtook her, but for a clearer account you may want to consult a professional in the field of mental health.

Ostensibly, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly, although it must have been clear to her that the fly was long-digested.  In reality, I suspect she swallowed the spider in an effort to banish the notion of having swallowed the fly, along with the corresponding aspersions of her possible death.  It might not make sense to you or me from our vantage point of comparative sanity, but such is the horror of having one’s faculties compromised.  Even a live spider isn’t a particularly hazardous object to swallow, but I for one would certainly find it more of a harrowing prospect than swallowing a fly.

Millions of years of evolution have led our species to an innate fear of crawling creatures with many legs, and in this light it’s hardly surprising that she began reporting feelings of “wriggling” in her stomach, even days after swallowing it.  By this point she was certainly not looking in the best of health, but rather than propose a psychological cause, a common reaction was tho chalk it down to what she’d been eating.  Please let me remind you, at this point she’d only swallowed a fly and a spider.  The public grasp of dietary issues, informed as they are by celebrity magazines and attrocious TV shows, is appaling.  The notion she might die from having simply eaten a live fly and a live spider is frankly ridiculous, but this didn’t stop people from feeding her paranoia with such fantasist health advice.

I can’t help but admire the rigor with which she pursued the line of reasoning she did, but I still regret not cottoning on once she bought the canary.  Admittedly, it’s small enough to squeeze down a well-lubricated oesophagus, but canaries don’t even eat spiders.  I’m sure in the event of a canary having nothing to eat but spiders, it would probably go for one.  This presumably still holds for phantasmal canaries with nothing to eat but the ghosts of once-swallowed spiders that haunt your stomach.  The neatness of the absurdity is apparent, and is one of the things that make mental illness such a fascinating yet tragic field of study.

I wish at the time I’d have said something, but how do you phrase a request like that?  “Stop swallowing a hierarchical menagerie of animals” just doesn’t seem adequate.  As things progressed, both social services and the RSPCA got involved, but when someone’s in the grip of an obsession there’s not a great deal you can do.  In her desperation, even the internal consistency of her delusions started to break down.  After all, dogs don’t actually eat cats, and goats certainly don’t eat dogs.  What was she expecting them to do?

I’m guessing the futility of introducing a herbivore as a natural predator in an ecosystem was probably the least of her worries towards the end.  Given that we were dealing with a woman with a compulsion to swallow a series of larger and larger live animals, we probably shouldn’t focus on the smaller ridiculous details.  Still, you’d think she’d have attempted a pony or something, rather than an adult warmblood; it’s not the biggest she could have gone for, but it’s certainly not the smallest.

She’s dead, of course.

I’m calculating this to teach myself a little humility.  I am currently configuring the most badass set of servers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.  My only gripe with them is that they take about four and a half minutes to carry out their 96GB memory check, and I have to spend this time staring at a blank screen, and if I don’t pay attention I’ll miss the BIOS configuration option.

Four and a half minutes staring at a blank screen seems like an annoying amount of time, but compared to how long it would take me to manually count up 768 billion bits, it doesn’t seem so long.  We have fourteen of them, so I’d be finished by the year 115550.  115551 if I stop for a break half way.

Computers are both awesome and terrifying.

The immaculately-dressed prude always looks quite good, and usually does what you request, but ask to see its process stack and it’ll slap you in the face. If you buy it a nice meal, and tell it that you love it, it’ll probably let you rummage around under its clothes for a bit, but it’ll complain the whole time, which really kills the mood.

The enthusiastic nudist, on the other hand, will happily show you its process stack, and its TCP/IP sockets. It’ll also tell you all about them, exactly how big they are, how well they perform and what all its friends think about them. The first time you meet it, you don’t know where to look, but you eventually get used to it, and it’s quite fun to romp around with it in the nude. Still, you couldn’t introduce it to your mother, and sometimes you just want to tell it to put some bloody clothes on.

Meanwhile, you’re contacted by your prudish ex-OS, which has started to get over its hang-ups. It’s still immaculately dressed, which is nice, but it’s also started taking blurry pictures of its private parts on its camera phone and sending them to you. That’s as far as it goes, but it’s certainly better than nothing, and at least you can take it out in public.

Jealous of the renewed attention you’re now lavishing on the prudish part-time exhibitionist, your nudist bedfellow makes itself some clothes and starts taking elecution lessons. It looks and sounds…well, quite good actually, but it acts awkwardly, like it doesn’t want to be wearing anything. In the end, the only way you can sensibly interact with it is to get it to take its top off, which it does gladly.

You’re faced with the choice between a prude that wants to endlessly tease you and a nudist that can’t decide which clothes it doesn’t want to wear. Your only alternative is Mac OS, a visitor from beyond the stars. It claims to be a nudist, but can’t survive in Earth’s atmosphere, so it spends all its time in a hermetically sealed exoskeleton and you don’t even know what it looks like.

So those are your options: shirts, skins or alien exoskeleton.

Well, it’s actually a category of phoneme produced by expelling air forcefully through the mouth in a manner that involves both lips, such as a b or p sound. Not filthy in the slightest, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair few linguistics students had their interest in the subject piqued by rude-sounding terminology.

Compare this to logical fallacies, which have rubbish-sounding Latin names that aren’t even remotely suggestive. Do you know what post hoc ergo propter hoc is? There’s no reason why you should unless you’re a Roman Legionary, and a posh Roman Legionary at that. It’s a fallacy of circumstantial causality. “I went canoeing and the day after I was diagnosed with diabetes. Clearly canoes cause diabetes.” Event 1 preceeded Event 2, therefore Event 1 must have caused Event 2. It seems obviously fallacious in the context of that example, but it’s a very common cognitive error.

There’s something a bit worrying about this disparity. Unless you have some pressing need to apply a global set of pronunciation standards, you are never going to need to know what a bilabial oral plosive is. On the other hand, you’re probably going to assume false circumstantial causality at least a dozen times before the end of the day. Knowing what our phonemes are called will probably not help us talk better, but knowing the terminology for common mistakes our brains are prone to make will help us think better.

The world is a distressingly complex place for walking talking monkeys like you and me to make sense of, so instead our brains make as many assumptions about it as they think they can get away with. Most of these assumptions were fine 80,000 years ago, but in a world squeezed full of digital communication, evidence-based medicine, mass-transit, mechanised infrastructure, politics, economics, engineering, urbanised society and a dizzying crapload of other complicated phenomena, these assumptions are often very wrong. It’s when our brains inappropriately make these assumptions that fallacies creep in, like mischievous imps, to play cruel games with our ability to reason properly.

It’s not easy to make logic sexy. T’Pol from Star Trek: Enterprise was a good effort, but she ultimately spent far too much time rubbing herself with detox gel and not enough deconstructing the validity of a priori propositions. There are other angles we can approach it from, though. I can’t help but feel a lot of the PR problems encountered by reason and critical thinking stem from the use of so much Latin terminology. It makes the subject seem elitist, when at its heart it’s a set of ideas for addressing thinking problems endemic to the whole of humanity. We should be taught this stuff as children, but the way it’s packaged makes it inaccessible to anyone but enthusiasts, obnoxious internet users and aforementioned posh Roman Legionaries.

Maybe we can’t make logic sexy, but what if we can make it smutty? What if post hoc ergo propter hoc were known as the Massive Balls Fallacy, with an example about a man who erroneously thinks the use of heavy bowling balls improves his performance? We’d all remember that one, wouldn’t we? Let’s teach them as innocuous double-entendres to unsuspecting seven-year-olds, and as they grow up it’ll cement itself into their brains. Simple parables illustrating critical thinking will be immortalised into adulthood as knob gags and risqué puns, celebrated across all educational backgrounds for generations to come.

If I could go down in history for one thing, I think promoting the discipline of logical reasoning by teaching kids smutty playground rhymes would be my number one choice.

You could make this claim for all mystery fiction bar Columbo, but I would argue that the locked room mystery subgenre suffers more from this than its less nerdy brethren. A puzzle is implicitly involved. The emphasis is on the howdunnit as much as the whodunnit, and picking apart an open problem for which there is no apparent rational explanation is what makes it so satisfying, like untying a particularly stubborn knot which seems to defy Euclidean geometry.

As you may have gathered by now, I quite like Jonathan Creek, although even I will admit it was limping along by its fourth season, in part because Julia Sawalha’s character didn’t fit into the show’s premise as well as Caroline Quentin’s, and in part because the series was just getting a bit tired and emotional. When I first got cable TV, in amongst the sea of reruns I was occasionally pleasantly surprised to stumble across an episode I hadn’t seen before, but this event became more and more rare as time went on. Eventually I resigned myself to the depressing fact that watching it would forever be nothing other than mental masturbation without climax, and the frustration of this led me to change the channel in disgust whenever I caught a glimpse of a familiar scene. It was at this point that I made my wish.

Anyway, last night my wish came true. A brand new, one-off, feature length Jonathan Creek Christmas Special, The Grinning Man, written by the show’s original creator David Renwick. OK, so it didn’t have Caroline Quentin in it, but it didn’t have Julia Sawalha in it either, so it could go either way. I watched it, and it was…alright, actually. A literal locked-room mystery, with a nice grim tone set straight from the start. The blonde from Two Pints of Lager… can deliver good dialogue as well as needless fishwife-screeching, and her character actually works as a gobby know-it-all foil against our titular protagonist.

It was far from perfect. For a start, it was two hours long on the BBC, with work the morning after. I’m not sure they could have trimmed it down to the magical 90 minute mark, but by 1h45 it was starting to groan a bit. Also, I figured out about 60% of the salient mystery elements long before they were revealed in-show. I’d love to claim my powers of deduction were responsible for this, but it was mostly down to televisual mystery storytelling convention. When the camera lingers unnecessarily over a seemingly irrelevant object in the first ten minutes of the episode, it might as well flash up an enormous neon sign reading “PLOT DEVICE”. This isn’t necessarily the TV show’s fault, but there’s only so much fourth-wall etiquette the viewer can apply without resorting to outright delusion.

Still, it was a force for good over a season of ambiguous Christmas television. There’s no word of a new series, and that might be for the best. All the obvious quality material was consumed early on in the show’s history, and I’d much rather leave it where it is, with the hope of future one-off specials produced over a long, quality-assuring gestation period.

There are two fundamental rules when performing magic: never tell them how it’s done, and never repeat the same trick twice. Jonathan Creek breaks the first rule as a matter of course, and when it comes to the second rule, some tricks are simply unrepeatable. If the BBC and The Honourable Mister Renwick wish to prove me wrong, they’re quite welcome to try.

Had I not been gently strong-armed into seeing this film, it would have completely passed me by. It would have sailed into the part of my brain that serves as a graveyard for probably-rubbish unwatched movies, alongside Herbie: Fully Loaded, or Stealth, or all those other films I haven’t bothered to watch and probably never will. If it had made this journey, my life would be a little less rich, and I wouldn’t even know it.

Where to begin? A talking mouse probably strikes you as a little unimaginative, but how about a city whose culture, economy and wellbeing revolves entirely around soup? Or a magic cookbook which summons a French chef made from fruits, vegetables and kitchenware? Or two distinct rodent civilisations put across with surprising depth for the small amount of screentime they’re actually given? It’s based on a book, entitled The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread. Having received somewhere just shy of about a million books this Christmas, I might have to put a pause on working my way through the pile so I can find a copy, and give it the attention it clearly deserves.

As well as a series of highly expressive characters, human and vermin alike, voiced by a cast of diverse yet familiar actors, the film has a surprisingly complex plot, which it nonetheless manages to weave and present in a very fluent and well-paced manner. It’s bolted together from standardised storybook components such as daring heroes, lonely princesses and bitter underlings (it is a children’s film, after all), but they’re pieced side by side in such a polished and minimalist way that every bit of it seems to be pulling its weight. There’s no gratuitous fat to trim from it. The narrative has nothing but what it needs in order to work, but it really does work.

Unlike a lot of contemporary animated films, it’s very sparse on the humour. It does have its moments, but it’s not played for laughs. There’s an actual story it’s trying to deliver, and that story is well-told, maturely developed and surprisingly charming. Remember charm? That thing we used to be charmed by, before ironic and edgy humour corroded our hearts into post-modern gag-processing machines.

I do worry this film will slip by unnoticed, into the probably-rubbish mental graveyards of so many people who would otherwise enjoy it enormously. It is a genuine worry I possess, because it deserves to be seen and enjoyed, and if you’re inclined towards being charmed by something unexpectedly good, you deserve to see and enjoy it. Please do.

It’s a bit of a big supposition, isn’t it? On the same sort of scale as “suppose there are ghosts in your fridge” or “suppose Frosty the Snowman’s magical hat fell into the wrong hands and was used to reanimate the embalmed remains of Joseph Stalin”. We seem to have this grudging acceptance that the world as we know it is probably going to end quite soon, or at the very least be plunged into an unspecified dystopian or post-apocalyptic future. What if it’s not going to?

Suppose technology saves us from climate change. Suppose we save ourselves from it. Suppose a series of new innovations revitalise the global economy. Suppose social reform leads the African continent into an era of mechanised transit and industry, bringing wealth and education to all its people. Suppose the quality of life of every social grouping in the world continues to steadily increase for the rest of our lifetimes, and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.

Suppose violent conflict continues to decrease; you might not think it to look at the news, but over the course of pretty much any statistically meaningful timeframe you want to measure it, wars are becoming less and less common on a global scale. So is crime, poverty and infant mortality. At 52%, the UK currently has the lowest rate of cancer survival in the developed world. Better than even odds, and if you’re in the other 48%, you’ll still live a longer and more functional life than you would as little as five years ago.

Suppose the world is actually a wonderful and continuously improving place. Suppose the high profile exceptions to this are fed into our congenitally paranoid brains by an exploitative media, which cares too little about representing reality and too much about keeping our attention. Consider this notion on a regular basis, especially when putting your trust in a third party news organisation.

We’re happy to question authority when it tells us what we want to hear, but when given a series of world events which we explicitly don’t want to hear, we just accept it. “Doesn’t surprise me”, we’ll say. The idea of everything going horribly and unavoidably wrong seems to be a bit of a comfort to us, but we all still keep paying pension contributions and having kids. Yet we know where we stand with a ticking time-bomb of a planet, slowly chugging its way to oblivion. It’s a disturbingly nice idea.

Suppose the world isn’t rubbish. You don’t even have to believe it, just play along at home for as long as you can bear to do so. Suppose everything’s going to be alright after all. If we’re so convinced of this handbasket’s inevitable infernal destination, why not pretend otherwise until we get there? It’ll certainly be a less obnoxious attitude to wave under the noses of our fellow passengers. Where’s the harm in it?

Suppose we’re optimistic. What’s the worst that can happen?

Ask a cynic about the cartoons of their childhood and they’ll paint a picture of crass commercial exploit, where glorified 23-minute toy adverts encouraged hyperactive seven year-olds to pester their parents for costly action figures. I, on the other hand, have far rosier memories of carefully woven moral tales, imparting valuable lessons onto impressionable young minds.

Naturally, because we were stupid kids we needed it spelling out for us in 30 second recaps at the end of the episode. Here are a few examples from wholesome furry-thonged action series He-Man.

A cursory look over the contemporary equivalents of these cartoons reveals that although these moral messages still exist, they’re not as prevalent as they once were. Given that you can’t take two steps in any direction these days without standing on another bloody cynic, decrying lax moral fibre and diminishing parental responsibility, you might think our society needs even more of these messages.

I’m inclined to agree, but I don’t see why it should be limited to children’s television. Contemporary media is a subtle artform, and we can’t expect the viewers to take from it what the creative team beind that artform intended. With that in mind, I’d like to see educational messages of all stripes appended to popular television series, briefly summarising what the viewer is supposed to have learned. Naturally, these should be delivered in character by popular cast members.

Imagine, if you will:

House and Dr. Cuddy sit in the lab. They both turn to face the camera and smile.

HOUSE: Hi there. In today’s episode of House, you saw me pressuring an ill mother-to-be to abort the unborn fetus that was killing her.
CUDDY: And me stubbornly resisting this act because of my own history with failed pregnancy.

Both smile again.

HOUSE: In the end, Dr. Cuddy got her way, and only extraordinary luck and my medical brilliance prevented the death of both mother and fetus.
CUDDY: Although the appropriate course of action should have been to abort the child -
HOUSE: Fetus.
CUDDY: - child, House’s insensitivity towards both my feelings and the feelings of the mother spurred me on to make non-objective and dangerous decisions. Although everything turned out alright in the end, real life doesn’t always work like that.
HOUSE: So remember, when influencing life-or-death decisions, don’t let your own emotional baggage impair your judgment.
CUDDY: And be mindful of the feelings of all involved parties, for fear of alienating them. Especially when dealing with sensitive issues.

They exchange glances and smile for the camera once more.

HOUSE: Until next time…

Credits roll.

Or:

Jack Bauer sits in a cargo container, furtively glancing at the entrance, caked in sweat and someone else’s blood. He turns to the camera and flashes a big grin.

JACK: Hi there. In today’s story I threatened to gouge out a terrorist’s eye with a knife unless he revealed vital information. Although I was doing this to safeguard millions of American lives, real life rarely has stakes this high, and even when it does, you still have to reconcile that with whatever ethical boundaries you may have…

Or:

Gil Grisham sits at his desk, studying a cockroach. He puts it down and smiles to the camera.

Gil: Hi. On today’s CSI, you saw me make a rudimentary mathematical error based on an erroneous assumption regarding the specific density of human flesh, which led to the conviction of an innocent man…

Even if they don’t actually tack them on to the end of the episode, even if they just film them and have them as an optional DVD extra, these would be marvellous sanity checks for the overall concept of the show.  I for one would find it refreshing and reassuring to know everyone involved, producer and viewer alike, actually took some time to think about how complex issues are being put across for the purpose of entertainment.

 I’d also like to see the creative team behind Lost have to come up with a summary of what the viewer is supposed to have learned at the end of each episode. That’ll learn ‘em.

I’ll tell you what it’s about: it’s about winding me up. Not me exclusively, of course, but all people of a finickety aural nature. If I look around I’ll see other people in the same situation, hands poised a foot apart with a look of pained confusion on their face. They want to clap along, but are faced with the Dutch choice of either clapping out of time with everyone else or doing it properly and looking like a complete spazz for being different. I’ve taken to sitting on my hands.

At first I thought this phenomenon was unique to the Big Session Folk Festival (officially the Third Whitest Place on Earth, after Oxfordshire and Parliament), but over the past few years I’ve noticed it more and more in a number of different venues, and it utterly beggars belief. There isn’t a more wrong place to clap without arhythmically flailing your hands together at random intervals.

Many years ago at a work Christmas party, I spent the entirety of Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves trying to convey the alien concept of “beat” to a Belgian work colleague. How can you not hear it? How? What’s wrong with you? It’s right there! And there! And there it is again! I’ve just about learned to accept the existence of these people, but I can’t lay all the blame for this offbeat clapping madness at their feet alone.

It’s not that the audience can’t identify the beat, but that they’re clapping exactly out of phase with it. With this in mind, I’d like to propose a theory: people inclined to start clapping to music have no natural sense of rhythm. Everyone else follows suit, either out of politeness or ignorance, and the crowd aggregates the clap to keep time exactly out of sync with where it’s supposed to be.

The solution is quite straightforward. Everyone in the audience wears a set of gloves wirelessly integrated into a system that monitors the drummer’s high hat and bass pedal movements. When these gloves come into contact with each other, they administer an electric shock, the intensity of which is determined by how far away it is from one of the pedals going down. No penalty if you’re bang on the money, a mild irritation if you’re slightly out of step, and blinding agony if you put your hands together at that dreaded perfectly incorrect moment.

Might make applause a little tricky.