Mr review of Robin Ince’s recent gig at the Electric Cinema is now up on Brum comedy site Who’s Laughing Now?.  You can find it here.

After the show I ended up briefly chatting (or elbowing my way into a conversation) with Mr Ince, who turned out to be a tremendously nice bloke.  I like it when that happens.  We talked about Jaws, Highlander and British Sex Comedies of the 1970s (well, he’d just performed at the former Tivoli Cinema, after all).  Eventually, we moved onto the subject of those forgotten films you still can’t get on DVD, and -- for that matter -- probably never will.   He told me about a British horror flick from 1974 called The Mutations.

Here’s the plot, courtesy of IMDB:

Students have been going missing from the local college, and the one person who knows what’s happened to them is Dr. Noller, a rogue biologist. Not satisfied with the pace of natural selection in driving evolution, Noller wants to push things further by creating his own genetically engineered creations. Having already created some amazing specimins by mixing the DNA of plants and animals, the doctor has now set his sights higher, and want to work on modifying humans, as well.

It starred Donald Pleasence as the mad scientist Noller and Tom Baker as his hideously deformed assistant, Lynch.   Yes, Donald Pleasence and Tom Baker.  Together.  In the same film.

I’ve never seen this movie.  I’ve never even heard of it before.  How can this be? I’m in the grip of some strange and terrible compulsion.

Looks like I’ll be dusting down the VCR and going on eBay, then…

Pleasence and Baker in 'The Mutations'

I went to see comedian Robin Ince at Birmingham’s Electric Cinema last Thursday.  He was performing his new one-man show – Robin Ince vs. the Moral Majority – as part of this year’s Birmingham Comedy Festival.  The bulk of the show consisted of a vicious yet hilarious attack on the so-called quality press and – in that respect at least – it was not unlike the final season of The Wire, albeit with more punchlines and less drive-by shootings.  Ince  was on remarkably good form and I’ve written a glowing review about it and everything.  I’ll tell you about that some other time.

Although the emotional content of the show was largely made up of anger, fury and the occasional bout of hysteria, Ince ended his set with something that was extraordinarily beautiful.  He read something I was familiar with but hadn’t seen for ages, a passage by the late Carl Sagan in which the famous American astronomer meditated on a photograph of our planet that was taken by the Voyager I spacecraft some 3.7 billion miles away:

Look again at that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.  There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.  Visit, yes.  Settle, not yet.  Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.  There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space  (1994)

The image above is the one that Voyager took.  If you look carefully – if you really squint at it – you’ll see a barely imperceptible white dot.  It’s just over halfway down and just under three-quarters of the way across.  It’s barely a pixel.

That’s us, that is.

I was checking the listings for Birmingham’s Electric Cinema today when I saw the following:

Electric Beach Party – Jaws & Roy Scheider Tribute

Friday 18^th

Summer comes early to the Electric with this special tribute to the late, great Roy Scheider and one of the scariest films ever made. The Electric Cinema Film Orchestra will return with a full 22 piece orchestra! £9 standard and £15 sofa with free Pina Coladas!

Sounds like fun and I’ll probably go. Jaws, after all, is one of my favourite films and Scheider’s death in February has got me thinking a lot about it lately. Jaws wasn’t the only great film that Scheider appeared in, of course, and his filmography included numerous supporting roles in undisputed heavyweights of 70s cinema like The French Connection, Marathon Man and Klute. He also turned up in films that, while not quite so critically acclaimed, have endeared themselves to me regardless. John Badham’s copter-based conspiracy thriller Blue Thunder [1983] springs to mind; don’t ask me why, but I’ve always had an inordinate weakness for copter-based conspiracy thrillers. One day I’d like to write the definitive book on this hitherto overlooked sub-genre, but that’ll have to wait until I can think of more than one example.

Scheider also starred in Peter Hyams’ criminally underrated sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], 2010 [1984], but had nothing to do with Steven Spielberg’s 1941 [1979], Ridley Scott’s 1492 [1992] or the 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four [1984].

Having said all that, there’s no getting away from the fact that Scheider shall always be remembered for playing the role of Amity Island’s Police Chief Martin Brody . And so it should be. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched Jaws over the years and – like all my favourite films – it is part of who I am. Its images, scenes and characters have seeped into my subconscious mind, inform my imagination and have a tendency to manifest themselves in strange and unusual ways.

To put it another way, I like to quote it a lot.

For instance, when faced with the limited and often insufficient storage capacity of the average supermarket shopping basket, I’ll often blurt out a Brodyism and snarl: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” This invariably attracts strange looks from shoppers, shelf stackers and instore security staff, particularly when you say it in the Duty Free compartment of a cross-channel ferry.

While taking photographs of people, I’ve often substituted the traditional pose-prompt of “Watch the Birdie! or “Say Cheese!” with Chief Brody’s more ballsy shark-slaying aphorism: “Smile, you son of a BITCH!” That also tends to get a mixed response, particularly at Weddings.

Finally, I’ve also been known to blurt out “This was no boating accident” to describe anything that doesn’t strictly fit the traditional maritime definition of “boating accident“.

In land-locked Birmingham, that tends to include most things.