Well, that’s it then…

I’ve just watched the final episode of the mighty Battlestar Galactica.  I’m probably one of the last of the show’s legion of fervent fans to have seen its finale, but so it goes.  I’m talking about the 21st Century Ron Moore-produced reimagining of BSG, of course, not the original 70s show with Lorne Greene and Faceman.  My lag time’s bad, but it’s not that bad.

First impressions: I liked it lots.  It was a sometimes perplexing but overall satisfying conclusion to one of the most consistently brilliant shows in TV history.   I even welled-up on a couple of occasions, but – like Jermaine in Flight of The Conchords – I’ll put that down to an inflamation of my tear gland (or, like Artie in The Larry Sanders Show, a bad case of “manly misting”).

I’ll let it all sink in, then maybe say more about it later.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

TORONTO — “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek is set to moonlight on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as host of the reality competition series “Canada’s Next Prime Minister.”

Canadian-born Trebek, who got his start at the pubcaster, will share the stage March 18 with three former prime ministers as they field pitches from four would-be politicos before choosing a winner.

Last month, the CBC got into hot water after admitting to breaking contestant recruitment rules and contacting political organizations to invite former young political candidates to compete on the series.

The CBC has sold “Canada’s Next Prime Minister” as a format to the BBC.

Italics mine, as is the jaw on the carpet.

How bizarre.

The Seinfeld season 8 DVD boxset came through the post this morning. I’m a big fan of Seinfeld, and used to avidly watch it on BBC2 during the 90s, but I never saw much of the last two seasons due in no small part to erratic BBC scheduling. This evening Clare and I watched the first disc worth of episodes including season 8 opener – The Foundation – which I’d never seen before.

By way of a set-up, the fiancée of self-proclaimed ‘Lord of the Idiots’ George Costanza died at the end of season 7 in a rather tasteless manner. She’d accidentally poisoned herself after licking the toxic gum on a batch of cheap envelopes that were to be used for their wedding invites. Needless to say, George bought the envelopes.

Season 8 opens with her funeral, and – in light of this week’s sad news about Ricardo Montalbán – I was rather suprised to find that the fist episode contained numerous references to his finest hour, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

It saddens me that we’re only a couple of weeks into 2009 and already I find myself writing about the death of one of my cinematic heroes.

Patrick McGoohan passed away after a short illness in his Los Angeles home yesterday. McGoohan, of course, will chiefly be remembered as the writer, co-creator, producer and star of the seminal, subversive and staggeringly brilliant 1960s TV show The Prisoner. As I’ve probably mentioned elsewhere, The Prisoner was, is and probably always will be one of my all-time favourite television shows and over the years I’ve watched the each of those 17 episodes – from Arrival through to Fall Out – more times than I care to admit.

In February last year Clare and I spent a lovely weekend in North Wales (which I wrote about here, here and here), and on the way back took a ridiculous detour so I could make my first, long-overdue pilgrimage to “the Village” itself, Portmeirion:

“In the popular imagination – well, in mine, at least – Portmeirion is the place where Patrick McGoohan’s famously numerophobic, former-government agent was sent to prison for a resignation he didn’t explain. As a huge fan of the cult 60s show The Prisoner, it was weird walking past all those odd buildings, so many of which have been hard-wired into my imagination since Channel 4 repeated the series in 1985. I was pleasantly surprised at how little The Village had changed in the 40-plus years since the show was originally made: Portmeirion’s Pantheon, for instance, was still recognisable as the green domed home to Number 2, while the stone boat on the shore still looked as mad and as incongruous as it did back then. Then again, it’s a boat. It’s made out of stone. How could it not look mad and incongruous?”

Like I said, I’m a fan.

Clare had never seen The Prisoner, and as we walked through Portmeirion’s Italianate grounds I told her all about the show. She couldn’t believe that somewhere as gorgeously ornate as this could serve as a fictional penitentiary and insisted on watching the series with me at the earliest opportunity. Now Clare’s a fan, too, and even little Lily seems to be getting in on the act. Instead of saying “Goodbye”, “So long”, “Auf Wiedersehen” or even “Adieu” she’s become rather partial to that weird and ubiquitous leave-taking phrase from the show, “Be seeing you.” She’s even mastered that weird salute – where the thumb and forefinger form a circle around the eye – that normally accompanies the phrase. It’s quite a thing to see.

But back to Patrick McGoohan. While he will forever be best known as The Prisoner’s Number 6, there was more to his illustrious stage, film and TV career than just that. In the 1950s, he so impressed another hero of mine, Orson Welles, with his stage presence that The Great Round One later admitted to feeling “intimidated“. In the 60s, besides The Prisoner, he also starred in one of the UK’s most successful TV exports, Danger Man (aka Secret Agent), became the highest paid actor in the UK and reportedly turned down the part of James Bond in Dr No on ethical grounds (or so the legend goes). We should also pause to consider the fact that he appeared not once, not twice, not even thrice but on four separate occasions as the murderer du jour in Columbo.

Some of the films he appeared in that deserve special mention include John Sturges‘ sublime Ice Station Zebra (1968), David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Don Siegal’s Escape From Alcatraz (1979). The last desrves special mention as he not only appeared alongside My Favourite Movie Icon of All Time, Mr Clinton Eastwood Jr, but he played Alcatraz Island’s sadistic prison warden. I always loved the irony of that.

Patrick McGoohan is survived by his wife of over 50 years Joan Drummond McGoohan and his his three daughters. My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

I almost forgot to mention… after leaving Hafod Elwy Hall in Denbighshire last Sunday, Clare and I embarked on a Keruoac-lite drive around North Wales. We headed west along the A5 and through Betws-y-Coed (or, as my brother prefers to call it, “Betsy Cohen”) before veering off in a random direction to see where the Road would take us.

Well, it took us past Moel Siabod and Snowdon and through some of the most rugged and gorgeous landscapes I’ve seen in quite some time. We stopped at a few places, took quite a few photos and ended up in Portmeirion. As you do.

In the popular imagination – well, in mine, at least – Portmeirion is the place where Patrick McGoohan’s famously numerophobic, former-government agent was sent to prison for a resignation he didn’t explain. As a huge fan of the cult 60s show The Prisoner, it was weird walking past all those odd buildings, so many of which have been hard-wired into my imagination since Channel 4 repeated the series in 1985. I was pleasantly surprised at how little The Village had changed in the 40-plus years since the show was originally made: Portmeirion’s Pantheon, for instance, was still recognisable as the green domed home to Number 2, while the stone boat on the shore still looked as mad and as incongruous as it did back then. Then again, it’s a boat. It’s made out of stone. How could it not look mad and incongruous?

Anyhow, here’s Portmeirion:

And there’s me, up there, by Number 2’s ornate lair:

And there I am again, outside Number 6’s home, cheerily refusing to be “pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.”:

I guess it pays to put your trust in the Road: sometimes it can take you to where you’ve always wanted to go.

I watched a couple of vintage documentaries about two of my favourite writers on Ye Olde Interwebs this week that I haven’t seen for bloody years. I guess it says a lot about my particular strain of temperament that [a] I can get genuinely excited about watching vintage documentaries I haven’t seen in bloody years and, [b] I never previously thought of checking the likes of YouTube or GoogleVideo for hot-damn, good-shit examples of the aforementioned [a] that I didn’t bother videotaping when they were first broadcast. Proof if proof were needed, then, that I’m still an analogue man living in a digital world.

Anyhow, the first was an BBC Arena doc from 1994 about SF author Philip K Dick called A Day in the Afterlife. I was 23 when I last saw it and, until then, the only PKD book I’d read was Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep in my capacity as a dutiful fan of the film Blade Runner. After watching the doc, I greedily devoured every PKD book I could lay my badly-manicured mitts on.

This is it:

Worth watching for the fake, Ubik-style PKD commercials presented by two of my heroes, fellow PKD fans Terry Gilliam & Elvis Costello.

The other vintage doc I revisited this week was brought to my attention that sage of online omniscience, Gentleman Pete Ashton. Called Monsters, Maniacs and Moore it’s about the Bard of Northampton himself, comics writer extraordinaire Alan Moore [who, as Pop Will Eat Itself once astutely observed, "Knows the score"]. The last time I saw this one was when it was first broadcast in 1987. I was even younger then.

Unlike the PKD doc, this didn’t turn me onto the works of the Bearded One: it was more a case of preaching to the converted. Watching it now, two decades later, reminds me of how exciting comics were back then. This was the period of Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – of Barefoot Gen and Maus – when even Marvel Comics were publishing English language editions of Moebius albums. To put it another way, this was a period when comics seemed to grow up just as I was supposed to be growing out of them.

Part 1 is below [parts 2-4 are here]:

Monsters, Maniacs and Moore was part of an 80s documentary series called England, Their England which was broadcast by what we used to call Central TV. That’s right, this brilliant and thoughtful documentary about a staggeringly brilliant writer working in a widely despised medium was broadcast on ITV. Possibly at prime-time.

Times have certainly changed.

One of my favourite Christmas presents this year was the Season 7 DVD box set of the classic 90s American comedy series Seinfeld. I say “Christmas present”, but I actually bought it for myself. ‘Twas the weekend before Christmas and – after spending a day spending my money on family and friends – I felt like indulging myself. I didn’t wrap it up or anything. I’m not that sad.

I’ve been a fan of Seinfeld ever since BBC2 started showing it as a double-bill with the equally brilliant The Larry Sanders Show 12 or-so years ago. I used to set the VCR to tape the shows then watch them after work the next day. I found it very therapeutic. Due to this scheduling quirk, even now – years later – I still think of the Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show as a pair of classic comedy co-joined twins. Maybe I always will.

Unlike other American comedy imports like Friends, Seinfeld never really caught on in this country. Maybe it was because, unlike Friends, it’s central characters weren’t funny, good-natured, likable people. They were funny, self-centred, thoroughly unlikeable people. I never much cared for Friends. The TV show, that is. In all other respects I very much care for friends.

Or perhaps its lack of popularity in Blighty was due to something else. Maybe it was because the clever-clever wordplay and shouty-shouty schadenfreude of New York Jewish comedy left many BritCit citizens cold – unless, like me, they raised themrselves on The Marx Brothers, Phil Silvers and Woody Allen and were one of the few Gentiles in the audience at Jackie Mason stand-up gig.

Or maybe it was a lot simpler than that. Maybe it was because Auntie Beeb – in her infinite wisdom – used to put it on ridiculously late at night. Like many American imports in those pre-digital days, Seinfeld (and, of course, The Larry Sanders Show) seemed to be shuffled around the schedules like an unwanted dog. You were never quite sure when it would be on, but you could just about safely narrow it down to somewhere between Newsnight and Breakfast News.

(If Heroes came out back then, I imagine the Beeb would have put it on at half-past Stupid-O-Clock on a Tuesday morning. They’d have probably cancelled random episodes at short notice in order to show live coverage of the Crown Green Bowling Semi-Finals at Roehampton. And, seeing how it’s such a continuity-heavy show, they’d have gone to the trouble to broadcast the episodes out of sequence. Like they did with The X-Files. Bastards. But I digress…)

Anyway, back to Seinfeld. For the uninitiated, here’s a description of the show I shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia:

Seinfeld violated several conventions of mainstream television. The show, which (correctly or not) is often described as “about nothing”, became the first television series since Monty Python’s Flying Circus to be widely described as postmodern. Several elements of Seinfeld fit in with a postmodern interpretation. The show typically is driven by humor dispersed with superficial conflict and characters with strange dispositions.

The characters were “thirty-something singles … with no roots, vague identities, and conscious indifference to morals.” [Hurd R. Wesley - Postmodernism: A New Model of Reality]. Usual conventions, such as isolating the characters from the actors playing them and separating the characters’ world from that of the actors and audience, were broken. One such example is the story arc in which the characters promote a television sitcom series named Jerry. The show within the show, titled Jerry was much like Seinfeld, in which Seinfeld played himself, and that the show was “about nothing.” Jerry was launched in the Season 4 finale, but unlike Seinfeld, it was not picked up into a series.

Many episodes revolved around the characters becoming involved in the lives of others to typically disastrous results. However, regardless of the damage they caused, they never gained anything from the experience and continued to be selfish, egocentric people. On the set, the notion that the characters should not develop or improve throughout the series was expressed as the “no hugging, no learning” rule. This quote is almost referenced in an episode (“The Secret Code“) where Kramer says to Jerry, “Well the important thing is, you learned something,” to which Jerry replies, “No I didn’t.” Unlike most sitcoms, there are no moments of pathos; the audience is never made to feel sorry for any of the characters. Even [George Costanza's fiance] Susan’s death in the series elicits no genuine emotions from anyone in the show.

You can see why I’m such a fan.

But back to the Seinfeld Season 7 box set. This was show co-creator Larry (Curb Your Enthusiasm) David’s last series, and – in the humble opinion of this Roman Catholic Irish raconteur dilettante eejit – was it’s finest. It featured classic episodes like “The Maestro”, “The Hot Tub” and “The Rye”.

And it also featured “The Soup Nazi“.

In “The Soup Nazi” episode, Jerry tells his deeply dishonest, atavistically insecure and cosmically misanthropic friend George Constanza about a great New York soup kitchen that makes soup so good it’ll make your legs buckle. The proprietor – however – is somewhat eccentric. He insists on a certain fascistic code of conduct amongst his customers and will tolerate no deviance, however slight. As you enter the store you step to the right, step forward, place your order, step to the left and pay. You do not engage in small talk. You do not question his judgement. You do not complain.

Needless to say, George Costanza inadvertently fails to comply and piss-your-pants funny comedy ensues. If you want to know more either watch the episode or go here. I’d prefer it if you watched the episode. Classic comedy is like good food: the menu is not the meal.

The Soup Nazi character was based on a real guy, Al Yeganeh, who ran the Soup Kitchen International in Midtown Manhattan (as I recall, it was just around the corner from the Letterman studios). When I visited New York a few years’ ago I made a personal pilgrimage to the Soup Kitchen International. Sadly, it was closed.

To paraphrase the Soup Nazi, there was “No soup for me.”