It's Good To Talk

In 1990, BT launched an advertising campaign featuring Bob Hoskins, star of The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to name but three of his big-screen successes, with the tag line “It’s good to talk.”

At a time when mobile phones were in their infancy, and BT had a monopoly on the landline market, this campaign was less about generating new business and more about getting existing consumers to use their phones more frequently. And the existing customers it targeted were men, hence the choice of Hoskins to front the campaign, because of the sexes, men – despite the fact that it was they who by and large paid the bills – made fewer phone calls.

It’s possibly as true today as it ever was that men are generally less inclined to pick up the phone – whether it’s a landline or a mobile – and call someone up for a chat. Perhaps I am perpetuating stereotypes, especially since my wife is not especially inclined to call anyone simply for a chat either, but generally it is my experience (based on an admittedly very small sample), that women are more inclined to use the phone for casual conversations than are men.

Whereas my mother would phone friends and family members regularly, and my first wife would do the same (I never understood why she saw the need to phone someone and chat with them for ages when she had already arranged to meet them that same day, but she did), my father seldom made calls to anyone other than – infrequently – to his brothers or sister. Even after I married and moved away from my parents, I can only recall him phoning me once, and that was for the very practical reason that my mother had recently become afflicted by tinnitus, and was driving him mad with her complaints about the noises in her ears that she thought were cars, lorries, or machinery outside the house.

I don’t recall my father ever calling any friends, although that was largely due to the fact that I don’t remember him ever actually having friends and I definitely don’t recall an occasion on which he went out with friends. That isn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy talking – getting him to stop was more often the problem - and whereas most people are ever keen to shoo away Jehovah's Witnesses when they call at the door, when they spoke to my dad it was more likely that they would make excuses and leave!

While BT were telling us, and men in particular, that it was good to talk because that would be good for their profits, the idea that it is good to talk is otherwise rightly based on the fact that it’s good for our mental health. I realise that I am stereotyping wildly (again), but generally, a group of women gathered together will have conversations much different from a similar group of men. Men don’t generally talk with each other about their feelings, their emotions, their fears or their needs. It is possibly a contributor to the alarming statistic that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK, and is responsible for 18 deaths every day.[1]

I admit that I am as reticent as the next man when it comes to expressing my feelings, but I really appreciate the benefits of doing so. My sole experience of professional counselling, which came back in 1993, proved immensely valuable, and while it may not be for everyone, it is definitely something which – if the need arises – should not be written off.

There’s an old saw that suggests that while men utter somewhere in the region of 7,000 words per day, women speak an average of 20,000 although research undertaken in 2007, and published in the American journal, Science suggests that this is way off beam. A decade’s worth of data collected by the University of Arizona in Tucson produced results that had women speaking 16,215 words and men 15,669 per day. I would be interested to know how many words I speak daily; there are many days when I reckon my total would be way below 15k.

A few weeks ago my wife and younger daughter went away for a few days, and although I spoke to them daily on the phone, it quickly dawned on me that barring the odd exchange with someone serving in a coffee shop or the supermarket, I went somewhere in the region of five days without having a face-to-face conversation with anyone. Did that bother me? No, not at all. Being an only child, I have always been comfortable in my own company; I think that I would have been ideally suited to some solitary profession – lighthouse keeper, perhaps – as on balance, I am an introvert. Of course, I knew that at the end of the week, my family were coming home but there are many people for whom a week - and longer - without a face-to-face conversation is the norm, for them it is no trivial problem.

I never considered lighthouse keeping as a career, but I reckon it would have been right up my street.

I Googled “am I an introvert” and the definition is me to a tee. Apparently, there is a seemingly paradoxical personality type, the talkative introvert; at times I think that is me, too, but only when there is something worth talking about!

Conversation for the sake of it – what one might call idle jibber-jabber – is sometimes almost physically painful in my experience. That isn’t to say that I can’t yabber on with the best of them (my wife would probably say that, like my father, there are times when it’s difficult to shut me up, and especially when she is talking; she calls it interrupting, I call it joining in – we’ve agreed to differ), but I don’t have a problem with silence, even in company. Companionable silence is, in my view, preferable to inane chatter.

The crux of all this though is that it is good to talk, but like so much in life, it’s about quality, not quantity, about making words count, and while I don’t entirely subscribe to the theory that a problem shared is a problem halved, sharing a problem can at least put it into perspective.

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[1] Source: https://www.thecalmzone.net/

Finished With Aplomb

I started this blog back in 2012 with the intention of publishing something every week, which I managed to keep up until 2017 when I missed a few weeks. 2018 was less productive still, there were more weeks when nothing appeared than those when something did. There are two obstacles to my publishing something every week, a lack of inspiration and a lack of time (if I’m honest, sometimes a failure of will to make the time).

But just because there isn’t a blog every week, it doesn’t mean I’m not writing anything. I’ve been writing articles for Romford Football Club’s matchday programme for longer than I’ve been blogging, and that means between forty and fifty pieces of about 800 words each between August and April each year. And this season I have ended up with the task of writing match reports for the programme and website, and for Saturday home games at least, for The Non League Paper. In a recent programme, I found that I had contributed seven of thirteen pages of text, or somewhere approaching 5,000 words. In what I hope is an instance of justifiable self-plagiarism, a somewhat cut-down and revised version of this blog is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of Romford's programme.

Add to that another new responsibility – I’m now jointly running the club’s website, for which I’m writing content such as match previews and news, in addition to the match reports – and I seem to be constantly pecking away at my laptop's keyboard.

Does all of this mean that I can call myself a journalist? Possibly, yes, if one uses the commonplace definition that journalism is writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites. Having work published in a national newspaper, even if it’s a niche publication like The Non League Paper counts, surely?

The wordcount - 120 - means that the report in The Non League Paper is very much
a cut-down version of the one that appears on the club website or in the programme.

Like a proper journalist, I’m not averse to using a bit of journalese. Read any newspaper and you will come across examples of it, words and phrases rarely used outside their pages. Only in newspapers are small children ‘tots,’ experts – especially scientists – ‘boffins,’ and any dubious activities that involve alcohol ‘booze-fuelled.’ The sports pages use expressions that the average fan rarely – if ever – utters, and football reports are no exception.

Match reports, including those that I write, have their own particular jargon, so teams that hold a three or four-goal advantage have ‘an unassailable lead,’ while their hapless opponents have ‘a mountain to climb.’ Some of the terms favoured by sports reporters are increasingly anachronistic. Strikers are sometimes deemed to have ‘turned on a sixpence’ before scoring, despite the fact that the old tanner probably went out of circulation before the forward in question – and probably the reporter – was born. 

A sixpence, forwards for the turning on of.

Shots that rebound off a post are normally said to have ‘struck the post’ as though there was only one, rather than two, or ‘hit the woodwork’ despite the fact that few goalposts outside public parks are actually made of wood anymore. 

Another somewhat inaccurate description used when a shot strikes the frame of the goal – another phrase rarely employed outside the sports pages – is that the forward was ‘denied by the woodwork’ as though the post or bar had made a conscious effort to prevent the ball entering the goal. Meanwhile, ‘aplomb’ – meaning composure or assurance – is a word that hardly ever makes an appearance in ordinary conversation, but features regularly in match reports, and on occasion on Match of The Day, when describing a confident finish.

How appropriate is aplomb in this report, I wonder? How hard did the writer have to try to get it in?

My first encounter with the word aplomb came in my childhood while reading one of the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. In Jennings Goes To School, the eponymous hero is called upon to summon the fire brigade by using the telephone. The headmaster, while making it clear that boys may not usually use the telephone without permission, praises Jennings, saying that he rose to the occasion “with exceptional verve and aplomb.” I immediately filed that away for future use, and am always pleased when an occasion arises to use it.

Another word which one seldom encounters these days outside of reports of football matches is the preposition, cum, used to join two nouns. Most often in match reports it will appear between ‘cross’ and ‘shot’ to describe a ball driven in from the flank that either ends up in the net or forces a save from the goalkeeper over and above a routine catch, and its use indicates that the reporter, and quite likely the player who delivered the cross-cum-shot, is unsure which it was intended to be. Cum does of course have another, rather more earthy use, hence when it appears in print it is likely to provoke some sniggering from readers, especially those not of the vintage for whom the word, in the context of a football match, is wholly unremarkable.

Good to see The Mirror keeping the traditional use of the word cum.

I confess  that not only do I find journalese fascinating, but that I resort to the odd example of it in my scribblings, thus ‘much-travelled’ is employed to label players who have had more clubs than Gary Player (one for the youngsters there), and ‘won’t live long in the memory’ is often used to describe games that fail to rise above a certain level of mediocrity. ‘High, wide, and none too handsome’ gets the occasional outing when describing a wayward shot at goal, while ‘we’ve all seen them given’ gets wheeled out when a penalty appeal is turned down, and mass confrontations are inevitably ‘handbags.’

A problem with writing match reports is the unavoidable need to refer to one team or the other frequently without simply repeating their name. A similar issue is faced when referencing certain players – particularly goalkeepers. Here, the reporter tends to resort to what is referred to as ‘elegant variation.’  It is my convention to refer to Romford as Romford in the first instance, and then Boro (the club’s nickname) in a single sentence, and similarly Romford’s opponents first by their given name and then by some alternative. In this way, Felixstowe might be The Seasiders when mentioned a second time, and then the visitors. In desperation to avoid repeating a team name, this may mean resorting to something as hackneyed as ‘the men from Suffolk,’ or -in desperation - ‘the team in stripes.’ Variation it may be, but elegant? Not always.

While reporters are resorting to well worn, tried and trusted expressions to describe events in games, the subs (sub-editors) on national newspapers are more inclined to look for new, memorable, and pithy, headlines. Except there is rarely anything new under the sun (or should that be under The Sun?). When Celtic were beaten at home in the Scottish Cup by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in February 2000, one headline writer came up with what he thought to be a new, Mary Poppins based gag, to wit, ‘Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious.’ Original, one might think apart from the fact that back in 1960s, the headline on a report of a Liverpool match against QPR in which Ian Callaghan scored a hat-trick read, 'Super Calli Scores a Hat Trick, QPR Atrocious.'

Still, both are better than The Observer’s effort after England beat Spain in a penalty shoot-out at Euro 96 – ‘Seaman Sinks Armada,’ and infinitely preferable to the Daily Mirror’s ‘ACHTUNG! SURRENDER! For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over!’ employed before the semi-final against Germany, although they might have got away with it had England actually won.

I have not yet managed to emulate Martin Lawrence, who once wrote match reports for Romford’s programmes and managed to include the word ‘crepuscular’ (relating to twilight) in one many years ago, and to date, ‘aplomb’ is not a word I have managed to incorporate into any of the reports that I have written, although I live in hope!

Meanwhile, my wife has recently started a writing course; she asked me if I would like to do it as well. I declined, “I’m writing enough as it is,” I said.

From Outer Space To The Centre of The Earth

In the last couple of years, I have seen more gigs, shows, concerts, and other types of performances than I probably had in the previous forty, and 2019 was another bumper year, with 23 shows, featuring 35 different bands, orchestras, and solo artists, at 17 different venues.

Rather than review each event, here’s a sketch of the good, the bad and the indifferent.

Best show:

A tough choice this. Marillion were a surprise delight, as was Howard Jones. Tubular Bells for Two – whom I saw a couple of years ago and were delighted by – were excellent, and Steve Hackett was – as usual – brilliant. But for best show it’s a toss up between RPWL, the German prog rockers who started life as a Pink Floyd covers band, but in 2019 toured in support of their new album, Tales From Outer Space, and Steely Dan at Wembley Arena. Playing at the tiny Boston Music Room in Tufnell Park, RPWL performed a masterly collection of songs old and new; a really great show. Steely Dan, however were on another level. The death of Walter Becker in 2017 means that Steely Dan are now effectively Donald Fagen plus backing band, but what a great show they put on! And supporting them was another of my long-time favourites, Steve Winwood: truly a great night’s music.

RPWL

Marillion

Best venue:

In recent years I have developed a preference for standing at gigs, and the Islington Assembly Hall has become a great favourite of mine. I saw no shows there in 2019, so it’s another old favourite, the Hammersmith Apollo that tops my list this year, with a more than honourable mention to The Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane, where I saw an opera (Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel), a musical (The Man From La Mancha), and a recording of the BBC’s Friday Night is Music Night featuring a host of artists who first found fame in the 1980s

Rick Wakeman performing Journey To The Centre Of The Earth

Biggest surprise:

I haven’t seen Marillion since the 1980s, when Fish was still with them. I’ve not listened to a great deal of their material since Steve Hogarth took over singing duties, and I’ve been fairly ambivalent about what I have heard, but I saw them with an orchestral ensemble at The Cliffs Pavilion in Southend and they were quite superb. I confess that a good deal of the material was new to me but it was almost immediately familiar, and the song they closed with – This Strange Engine – has to be not just one of the best tracks they have recorded, but one of the top prog songs of all time. Howard Jones was a similarly surprising delight, as his show featured old stuff – much of it reworked, with Jones accompanying himself alone on piano – and new material from his latest album, Transform which impressed me to the degree that I immediately bought it. Another surprise was a ballet. My wife has become a bit of an opera and ballet fan in recent years, and I’ve seen a few with her, one of which was the ballet Don Quixote which we saw at The Royal Opera House, and which I found enchanting. A problem I have with operas is the surtitles at operas, which tend to divert my attention from the stage and give me a bit of crick in the neck; no such problem with ballet where I can give the dancing my undivided attention as there’s no singing in a language I don’t understand!

Howard Jones, with guitarist Robin Boult

Best support:

Support acts are a mixed blessing; I’ve seen some great one’s over the years and some that have been dire. Kanga, who performed a set of electronic stuff in support of Gary Numan at The Cliffs Pavilion, was ok for the first five minutes, but then I grew steadily more and more bored. The Temperance Movement, who supported Blue Oyster Cult, were ok, and China Crisis (supporting Howard Jones) were better than I’d expected. Most times at gigs, the support act is someone I’ve never heard of, such as Harry Payne, who opened for Marillion and was excellent – I could have done with another half-an-hour of his material. He would have been the best I saw in 2019, had it not been for Steve Winwood, although I would have enjoyed him even more if he had performed more of his solo material.

Least best show:

I’m loath to categorise any of the shows I saw in 2019 as bad, but there were a couple that were underwhelming. Actually, on reflection one was pretty poor, and that was Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel. Now, I quite like opera, but I’m no expert and it isn’t my first choice for musical entertainment, although I do like Rigoletto and Carmen (albeit not the performance I saw in 2018, where the set was a minimalist let-down and rather dragged the music down with it), but the Jack The Ripper opera was unremarkable at best. Most operas have at least one piece that you can’t get out of your head afterwards, but The Women of Whitechapel was pretty tuneless in my opinion. It was possibly the longest three hours of my life. If the show is ever revived, take my advice and avoid it. Don’t Fear The Reaper is one of my all-time favourite songs, and I saw Blue Oyster Cult perform it way back in the 1970s at what was then known by its proper name, the Hammersmith Odeon. I saw them again at the same venue in 2019, and quite frankly I think they must have performed the same set as I’d seen last time. According to the website setlist.fm, Blue Oyster Cult have performed The Reaper 2,299 times, and I think it showed. Don’t get me wrong, Blue Oyster Cult are undoubtedly a great band, but at times that evening I felt that they were going through the motions somewhat.

Spookiest moment:

My wife and I are great fans of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake novels, and the most recent – Tombland – is set in Norwich at the time of Kett’s rebellion, and in the novel Shardlake stays at The Maid’s Head, a real hotel that is still operating. Val and I stayed there for a couple of nights in July, and it is a charming hotel, well worth a visit, as is Norwich generally. 

The Maid's Head, Norwich

When we visited the cathedral, we heard some singers; they turned out to be The Spooky Men’s Chorale, an acapella group from Australia’s Blue Mountains, who were performing in Norwich that evening. We went to the venue’s box office, but the show was a sell-out. We loitered in hope of some tickets being returned, and two were – by separate people – and spookily, next to one another. The Spooky Men’s Chorale’s repertoire consists of original songs, Georgian table songs, and what they call ‘inappropriate covers’ which included a highly original version of Bohemian Rhapsody, All in all, a great night, and a surprising delight.

Best t-shirt:

I have mentioned before that I have a real weakness for merchandise at gigs, specifically t-shirts. Merchandise is a major source of income for smaller bands, so I justify my purchases on the basis that I’m really supporting the artists. Eleven were purchased in 2019, with Steely Dan’s offering, and Roger Hodgson particularly good, but the best was undoubtedly the IQ Christmas effort.

This time last year I had 11 gigs lined up and eventually saw 23; at the time of writing I have tickets for 11 more in 2020; I doubt that that will be the final total!

January

La Traviata – Royal Opera House

 BBC Concert Orchestra - Friday Night Is Music Night – Hackney Empire

February

Blue Oyster Cult – Hammersmith Apollo. Support from The Temperance Movement

Steely Dan – Wembley Arena. Support from Steve Winwood

March

BBC Concert Orchestra – Double Acts – Royal Festival Hall

That Joe Payne plus Doris Brendel – Zigfrid von Underbelly

April

Don Quixote – Royal Opera House

RPWL – Boston Music Rooms. Support from Aaron Brooks

Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel – The Coliseum

May

Tubular Bells For Two – Queen Elizabeth Hall. Support from Gypsyfingers

Roger Hodgson – Royal Albert Hall

Howard Jones – London Palladium. Support from China Crisis

June

The Man From La Mancha – The Coliseum

July

The Marriage of Figaro – Royal Opera House

The Spooky Men’s Chorale – Norwich Playhouse

Rick Wakeman: Journey To The Centre of The Earth – Royal Festival Hall

In Tune (BBC Radio 3) – Imperial College Union

October

Gary Numan – Cliffs Pavilion, Southend. Support from Kanga

Friday Night Is Music Night: The 80s with Carol Decker, Johnny Hates Jazz, Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Jimmy Somerville – The Coliseum

November

Marillion – Cliffs Pavilion, Southend. Support from Harry Payne

Steve Hackett – Hammersmith Apollo

IQ – The Garage, Islington

December

BBC Singers: Contemporary Christmas Carols – Temple Church, London

Every Home Is Wired

They say you don’t get anything for nothing in this life, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Being mindful of all that, you can imagine that I was somewhat sceptical when I received an email purportedly from Google offering me a free Google Home Mini, then retailing at £49.99 on the basis that I was a good customer.

Despite the fact that I, like virtually everyone else, use Google a lot, I’ve never really considered myself a customer, so the email naturally made me somewhat suspicious. My first inclination was to dismiss it as a phishing email and simply delete it, but since it was addressed to me by name and quoted my credit card details, I decided to investigate a little further. It dawned on me that the fact that I rent Cloud storage from Google was what made me a customer, and the fact that they weren’t asking me to subscribe to anything, pay anything, or even provide credit card details over those they had quoted to me, convinced me that this was a legitimate offer. So, I accepted.

A week or so later, my device arrived and I set it up. Now I have to admit that I feel a little self-conscious about uttering ‘Hey, Google,’ and asking the little grey pebble in the corner of the lounge to provide me with a weather forecast, or last night’s football results – I still prefer to type my question on laptop or tablet - but my wife seems to have taken to it, even if mostly she uses it to set alarms.

Still, whether I use it or not, it’s not taking up much room, and it’s harmless, and occasionally useful isn’t it? Or is it? There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence (or conspiracy theories, depending on your point of view), that all these home assistants, whether it’s the Amazon Echo, the Apple HomePod, or any of Google’s range, are spying on us, that the big tech companies are harvesting data on us.

Rumours have gone around for years that Facebook and others are using our smartphones to listen to us and target us with advertising based on what we are talking about, and conspiracy theory or not, I’m sure we’ve all experienced that somewhat unsettling experience of an advert popping up on our social media timelines for a product that we’ve talked about, but not actively searched for online. Coincidence, or something more sinister? The big tech companies have largely denied listening to users – for the avid conspiracy theory aficionado, denial is proof, of course – but Google have admitted that their contractors have listened to recordings to better understand language patterns and accents. Which makes sense, that to improve their service, they would listen and learn.

Even if Google is listening to me, do I care? I’m not discussing affairs of state, I’m not a celebrity whose gossip might be newsworthy, so if Google, or Facebook, want to listen to me discuss plans for dinner, or attempting to answer questions on University Challenge, then let them listen away.

My Google device did take me by surprise a while back by demonstrating how carefully it listens. I was watching Have I Got News for You, and one of the guests was talking about Google Hubs; ‘Hey Google,’ they said, ‘play some soft rock music.’ Seconds later, my smartspeaker was playing ‘This Is Not America,’ by David Bowie. Spooky.

My Google Home Mini is the closest I have to anything resembling the much vaunted, but seemingly slow to take off, Internet of Things. I see the value of connecting things like the central heating and lighting to a home network, and being able to control them remotely, or verbally, but I’ve yet to see the benefit in food blenders, coffee makers, toasters and fridges that are ‘smart,’ frankly I’d prefer those devices to stay dumb – and mute, for that matter.

Looking back over the technology that has come and gone during my lifetime – the 1980s were full of such items as fax machines, video recorders, compact discs, and the short-lived and ill-fated video disc, all of which have either disappeared from our daily lives or are going that way – and it is now impossible to even attempt to guess what we now think of as cutting edge that will still be around ten years hence. Google Glass came – and went – in the blink of an eye; not all technology is useful, popular, or successful, and even now I can imagine future generations laughing at the idea of speaking to a device and asking it to tell you the time, or what’s on TV.

Spotify, Amazon prime, and Netflix - to name but three such services - now mean that a fast, reliable broadband connection is almost a necessity, and it is difficult to see the day dawn when that is no longer the case, although we said that about fax machines. It’s undeniable though that catch-up and on demand services have supplanted many forms of physical media, although my personal preference remains CDs so far as music is concerned, but there’s a catch with all that and it hits us in the wallet. The TV Licence is £154.50, a cable or satellite package with broadband is say, £90 a month or just over £1,000 a year; add Netflix (a minimum £72 per annum), and Amazon Prime (£79 a year), because there are programmes exclusively available on those channels that you just have to have, and that’s nearly £1,400 for 12 months, just to watch TV.

Think about that: £1,400 per year, to watch TV, and five nights out of every seven you’re sitting there saying there’s nothing on and ending up watching repeats of QI on Dave. Which is why in our house we have just binned the Virgin Media TV package we have. This might strike you as perverse considering the hoops we had to jump through to get it in the first place (see my blogs on the subject, Virgin On The Ridiculous, Parts One, Two, and Three, although there never was a Part Four when I actually got it installed), but night after night I do sit there complaining there’s nothing on and finding myself watching a repeat of QI on Dave, or if not that specifically – and this is the crux – I’m almost exclusively watching channels that are available on Freeview. So, come the beginning of February I’m saving myself £500 a year by reverting to the free-to-air stuff.

Step by step, every home is being invaded; every home is wired. And every home is paying a princely sum for the privilege. It starts off small, a little here, a little there, a little on the things you think you can’t afford to miss, and then suddenly you’re paying a King’s ransom for stuff you don’t use, don’t really want, and definitely don’t really need, and the shocking fact is that a lot of it you can get for free, and the stuff you have to pay for you’d not really miss if you had to give it up.

Google’s decision to give me – and goodness knows how many other people – a free Home Mini may genuinely be a reward to loyal customers; it may just be a marketing tactic to expand their market, or it may be a step in the tech giant’s home invasion.

“This will be the future, Every home is wired” – Steven Wilson

Alternative Histories

No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that anyone could make a duller, more boring, version of The War of The Worlds than Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film that starred Tom Cruise. That was until the BBC got hold of the HG Wells classic, and made a complete pig’s ear of it.

I have loved The War of The Worlds ever since I first read the book over forty years ago, and have always wished that someone would make a version set faithfully in Victorian England. I am still waiting. The BBC chose – for reasons that are unclear to me – to shift the narrative from the late nineteenth century, to the early twentieth; a minor cavil, and certainly very minor compared with the liberties they took with the story as a whole, and ultimately how dull they managed to make the whole thing.

Spielberg's version of The War of The Worlds had its flaws, but the basement scene in which Tom Cruise protects his children from the Martian tentacle had more menace than the whole of the BBC adaptation.

The first episode was promising, even if Wells’s unnamed narrator and his wife Carrie had been replaced by someone called George and his significant other, Amy. George is already married, his wife refuses him a divorce, and his brother disapproves of George’s relationship with Amy. But at least we have the Martians, and the first sight of the tripods, although the heat-ray – which features heavily in the book - barely gets a look in; perhaps the special effects budget got spent on the red planet scenes. Those scenes of Amy wandering through a barren landscape with her child, which do not feature in the book in any way, were at first sight, baffling. They tended to dominate the third episode, and first my inclination was to deem them unnecessary. On reflection, however they actually added something. In Wells’s book, once the Martians have been vanquished, everything returns to normal very quickly, however it makes sense that the red weed, having strangled much of the land, would leave the country in a state of disarray.

The biggest problem with the scenes after the Martians’ hold on the planet had ended was that they so dominated the third and final episode, which to put it mildly, was one of the most boring hours’ worth of television that I have seen for a long while. Amy’s pontificating got on my nerves and added little or nothing. Not everyone made it to the third episode, however. I had bigged the series up to a friend on the strength of the first episode, which he watched. He gave up after the second, and I can’t say I blame him.

Some reviews made reference to the ‘woke’ nature of The War of The Worlds (woke in Woking as it was described by some), and I guess making Amy – an unmarried mother as it turns out – the driving force behind the story and probably the strongest character, supports that notion. There was – perhaps inevitably – reference to the comparison drawn between the Martian invasion and British imperialism, although this was hardly original; Wells himself drew the analogy in the book.

Eleanor Tomlinson as Amy, with Rafe Spall, who played George.

 

The problem with TV or film adaptations of much-loved books is that the viewer will have their preconceptions; the producers have different ones. There is inevitably a certain amount of tinkering with any adaption, however the BBC took it too far with The War of The Worlds and managed to change the emphasis to the extent that the war element was dealt with in a very perfunctory manner, while greater stress was placed on the relationship between George, his brother Frederick, and Amy, and the struggle of the humans to live after the war. Of the battle between the tripods and HMS Thunder Child we saw nought, and the Martians’ harvesting of human bodies was alluded to but not included explicitly.

The Man In The High Castle is a very different kettle of fish. I have come a little late to the party as far as the series on Amazon Prime is concerned, and at the time of writing have made it only to episode two of the second season. Whereas the BBC spread Wells’s book over just three hour-long episodes, Amazon have taken forty hours to adapt Philip K Dick’s book. Inevitably this means a good many different plot lines, liberties taken with characters and a few fundamental changes to the storyline. I say that, although I have not read the book for many years, although I intend to revisit it before too long. So far I have to say I have enjoyed The Man In The High Castle very much, although as with many series – especially American ones – there are meanderings away from the main plot that smack of padding, and the character of Obergruppenführer John Smith does not feature in the book, and therefore much of the TV series that centres around him has nothing to do with Dick’s novel. None the more for that, it knocks The War of The Worlds out of the park.

Alternative histories in which Germany won World War Two abound, from Len Deighton’s excellent SS-GB (subject of a patchy adaption, again made by the BBC) through Robert Harris’s masterly Fatherland (probably the best of the genre), Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy and of course The Man In The High Castle. These are just a few of the many novels that begin with that premise; an alternative outcome to the 1939-45 conflict is fertile ground indeed for authors.

Naturally, Philip K Dick’s version of an alternative reality would not be a proper Dick story if the real world – or at least another alternative – were not to be bleeding through. In the novel, this is signified by a book – The Grasshopper Lies Heavy – which becomes film in the TV series, a visual reference in a visual medium being more effective of course.

It is probably fair to say that one of the best adaptions of The War of The Worlds is actually Independence Day, which is thoroughly enjoyable in my opinion (the sequel is utter garbage, however), and which benefits from having Jeff Goldlum and Will Smith in the cast (I’ll happily watch almost anything that Will Smith is in. The bacteria that kill off the Martians in Wells’s book are replaced by a computer virus, and although the uploading of the virus from a laptop to the alien’s mainframe is of course ridiculous (the organisation I worked for couldn’t get two legacy systems to communicate with one another), it was a clever updating of Wells’s idea.

I live in hope that one day someone will make a version of The War of The Worlds that is faithful to Wells’s book, but in the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with Jeff Wayne’s musical masterpiece with its marvellous artwork by Peter Goodfellow.

My Generation

Labels are for clothes, and it has always struck me as rather unsatisfactory to lump together a diverse mix of people and apply a glib title to them. Which is why terms like Generation Z, and Millennial have always puzzled me somewhat. I now know (although am likely to forget) that Millennials are people born between 1980 and 1994, and Generation Z comprises those born from 1995 to 2015.

This means that in my immediate family we have a Millennial, a Generation Zer, and two Baby Boomers (that's me and my wife, obviously, the other two being our daughters).

The Baby Boomer graphic actually looks uncannily like me.

The Baby Boomer generation (those born 1944-1964) is, unlike the names for the other cohorts, a title that I've been familiar with for many, many years. With a spectacular lack of interest, it never really occurred to me that subsequent generations would be given titles too.  And the Baby Boomer moniker is accurate enough, describing the post-war prosperity that was particularly enjoyed in America and which resulted in a growth in birth rates. I'm not entirely convinced that in the UK any baby boom was driven by prosperity as many people - my parents included - led a financially precarious existence (my Dad had many different, often shortlived jobs when I was growing up).

After the Baby Boomers came the group dubbed Generation X (born 1965-1979, and of whom little reference ever seems to be made as far as I can tell), then Millennials, then Generation Z. None of this is of any great importance to me, but to some - social scientists and marketing men especially - the difference between generations is key.

Marketing products by appealing to key elements of a particular generation's characteristics will help maximise sales of whatever product we are talking about. Baby Boomers are unsurprisingly the biggest consumers of traditional media such as the TV and newspapers; they are more likely than any other generation to prefer to do their banking in branches rather than online, and many have concerns about the security of their finances as they pass into retirement. Generation Z, on the other hand rarely, if ever, visit a bank branch, have grown up in a world where the internet is ubiquitous and therefore have become entirely reliant on their smartphones and other devices. Streaming services and online content have replaced traditional methods of watching TV for them, and they have probably never even read, let alone bought, a physical newspaper.

The application of specific titles for different generations and the psychobabble that surrounds it is merely a more complex way of saying that we are different from our parents and different from our children. Which is the same as it ever was, way back to the generation that saw the sabre tooth tiger become extinct and told their offspring that they didn't know how lucky they were not to have to contend with such big cats.

New life has been breathed into the generational gap thing this year with the entry into our language of the phrase, "Ok, boomer," which allegedly came into being when - in a TikTok video[1]  - a grey-haired man (presumably a Baby Boomer) says that “millennials and Generation Z ... don’t ever want to grow up.” On a split-screen next to him, a young man silently holds up a notepad on which is written “OK Boomer.”

Inevitably, 'Ok boomer' went viral and has even spawned a range of clothing. The phrase itself is used by many who belong to Generation Z to target those of particular political persuasions - think supporters of Donald Trump, or Brexit - those who resist technological progress and hold unreconstructed views on climate change and the like. I guess that if you wanted to put a face to this generation it would look like Piers Morgan or Jeremy Clarkson. This whole 'ok boomer' thing is of course, terribly ageist and a sweeping generalisation; it's also true to a large extent.

I consider myself to be relatively enlightened - I've embraced many of the new technologies, I rarely go into a bank branch, I'm comfortable with streaming services, read online or downloads rather than buying  physical newspapers or books - and I think that I have a relatively young outlook. In short, I don't think that I am a typical boomer, however, I have to admit to exhibiting a few of the traits that apparently define my generation.

For one, I am likely to launch conversations with the phrase, "In my day,"  for example making comparisons with the three channel television coverage that I had to endure when I was growing up with the multiple channels and exponentially growing number of streaming services available today. I am also likely to sit, stewing quietly and muttering complaints, in restaurants when I see people who came in after us get their order taken and their food served more quickly than my group.

Baby boomers hold their phones in one hand and text with their pointer finger (I think they mean index finger): Yep, that's me. Boomer culture is lining up to board a plane 30 minutes early: Again, yes, although 30 minutes sounds like cutting it a bit fine if you ask me.

There are a lot of stereotypically boomer traits that I don't have, however. I don't invoke the Second World War as a justification for being right - or for anything else, come to that. WWII was over for more than twelve years before I was born, how on earth is it relevant? I don't find it necessary to mention the ethnicity of everyone when I relate an anecdote, I don't double space after full-stops, and I don't assume that every screen is a touch screen. Oh, and I am not offended by the whole 'Ok boomer' thing and I don't think it is ageist, I actually think it's rather amusing (if a bit boring now), and completely normal inter-generational banter.

Double spacing after a period (full stop)? Rees Mogg's your man, and
having been born in 1969, he's not even a boomer, he's part of Generation X

Just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun however, I read this morning that today's teenagers  have started accusing millennials of being out of touch, as it seems that  they are making fun of the younger generation, by romanticising older TV programmes, and beginning sentences with, "kids these day." Furthermore millennials think that their music is better than modern music, that today's teenagers "don't understand the 'pain' of rolling up a car window with a handle instead of a button."

Perhaps most tellingly, millennials are slowly losing their innate gift for understanding technology - my younger daughter has admitted as much to me - and just like the baby boomers, they are finding the pace of change and new technologies bewildering.

If all of this is true, then millennials and baby boomers have much, much, more in common than either of them thought. The fact that we have gone from 'ok boomer' to teenagers mocking millennials in the blink of an eye is something I find really rather reassuring.

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[1] TikTok is a social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The app was launched in 2017 by Chinese developer ByteDance (Wikipedia). I offer this for the benefit of Baby Boomers who probably think that TikTok is the sound a proper clock makes.