Lowest-common-denominatorism: "The First 200 Years of Monty Python" by Kim Howard Johnson

One of the best lines ever in the “Summarize Proust Competition” sketch, one of my all-time favourites:

Mee: “Harry Bagot, you're from Luton?”

Harry: “Yes, Arthur, yeah.”

Mee: “Now Harry what made you first want to try and start summarizing Proust?”

Harry: “Well, I first entered a seaside Summarizing Proust Competition when I was on holiday in Bournemouth, and my doctor encouraged me with it.”

Mee: “And Harry, what are your hobbies outside summarizing?”

Harry: “Well, strangling animals, golf and masturbating.”

Mee: “Well, thank you Harry Bagot!”

Harry walks off-stage. Music and applause.

Voice Over: “Well there he goes. Harry Bagot. He must have let himself down a bit on the hobbies, golf's not very popular around here...”

In the 80's Portuguese TV had only two channels, and on weekdays non-children programs began only at 7pm. The public broadcaster did news, sports, etc., the other eighty percent of the slots was filled by broadcasting organization representing protestants, Catholics, conservatives, liberals, social democrats and so on, all preaching to their own parishes.

For a young progressive minded schoolboy that was a recipe for total boredom in the evenings, there was however RTP2 that did offer three, four hours a week of progressive, creative, avant-garde, even risky programming. They brought Monty Python to Portugal and I was immediately hooked, it was such a difference from the smug, conformist type of comedy that ruled over here. My problem was however that the one TV set in the house was monopolized by my sister and my grandmother, plus my grandmother strongly disapproved of me watching 'subversive' material. I had to sneak after 23 pm or midnight to watch the programme after everybody else had gone to bed. The schedulers were putting the programme on later and later until one episode was transmitted after midnight. I was 15 at the time and still at school so this was well after my bed time. I had to turn the sound down and sit as close to the TV as possible so as not to wake my grandmother and sister. The next day at school I was only able to discuss the episode with an increasingly smaller number of fellow fans who were either doing the same or who had more lenient parents. It's no wonder the viewing figures were so low. The potential audience was getting smaller and smaller as the broadcast time got later and later plus they weren't talking to the people who were actually watching the show.

I have it all on my hard disc now, it was never easier, but it was never better to watch that unique British comedy than as that 14-year old schoolboy knowing parents and teachers would be disgusted and more than ready to end the practice. Monty Python also introduced me to the English mindset more than anything else and it has prepared me more than anything else for the absurdities we are now the witnesses of. I also learned more about philosophy (e.g., “Germany vs Greece - Philosophers Football Match”: Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside…; to this day every time I hear a serious reference to Immanuel Kant I start to hum to myself 'was a real pissant...'), political theory and English verb conjugation from Monty Python than I ever learned from school!

The demands of making a sketch series inevitably means there are going to be duds. Cleese has admitted that a good deal of the material wasn't great, but I think that would stand for any sketch comedy series. But the glorious bits are sublime. They were the Mozarts of comedy. The films were a good deal better. Even the somewhat scattershot “Meaning Of Life” was glorious. When they had to compress an entire concept down into 90 minutes, and within some sort of plot structure, it greatly benefited their brand of humour. “Life of Brian” is probably one of the most timeless comedy films ever made, and for sheer silliness nothing beats the opening credits of “Holy Grail”; for me, the incredible thing about “Life Of Brian” is that virtually every one of its lines are endlessly quotable: "Oh, it's the meek blessed are the meek, it's nice that they're getting something cos they have a hell of a time", "One more word out of you, and I'll take you to the fucking cleaners"…

Netflix has all the MP series and I watched them again. Some great bits of course. Some is half-baked and under-rehearsed. I much prefer the albums which, to me, are much funnier and sometimes even weirder than the TV shows. All hail Python anyway, my teenage years would have been much less exciting without them.

Bottom-line: Bloody university types going around belittling the rest of us with references to long-winded French novelists, not to mention making up songs about obscure foreigners with names like Heidegger and Descartes. I mean, how can you call it comedy when a joke is predicated on the audiences' knowledge of a painting by Leonardo or of their grasp of Latin grammar? Thank God for the inclusive lowest-common-denominatorism of a real comic genius like John Cleese! This book does not do full justice to the Monty Python Series.

We're Trillions of Light-Years from Home: "Lost in Space" (2018) by Netflix

"We're trillions of light-years from home!"

In "Lost in Space" (2018 version)

I've just watched the first episode, but neither this first take nor some misguided people will persuade me that there’ll be much to engage an adult. It looks to me like they passed the show through the usual J.J. Abram Makeover Machine, particularly the robot, who resembles a character from an anime inspired PS4 game. If too many of the scenes are similarly generated in the series, with a constantly floating from point to point camera and the cast digitally comped in to say a few breathy lines whenever we zoom through a window, then I’ll keep getting that feeling I get with many a Netflix original SF creation - that I need to keep my controller to hand for when these overly long and confusing cut scenes end and the Benfica vs. Porto football game starts next Sunday. Yeah, I’ve not got high hopes for it, but it’s not like the original campy nonsense was highly regarded as gritty SF as well. I think the camp/kitsch aspect is what made the original series so popular. Removing that seems like removing the entire soul of the series. It was (after the black&white first series) completely camp and completely kitsch at the time - that was the whole idea. The monster in one of the episodes was a giant carrot for goodness' sake. The mid-60s (1966 to be precise) is well documented as when the mainstream suddenly cottoned on to the idea of camp (Susan Sontag having been the first to pin down what it was in her "Notes on Camp" a couple of years before). "Batman" led the way and is (along with the increasingly outlandish "Avengers") the best and funniest example, but other shows like "Lost in Space" seized on the sudden popularity of "so bad it's good" as an excuse to not even try to be good when they could attract millions of viewers by being conspicuously terrible.

What about this 2018 foray? All that future technology and they're still lost? Obviously didn't get 'lifetime maps'. Fortunately Zuckerberg knows where they are... This show doesn't look like it's going to contribute anything new - it's just trading on the name of the original while throwing out everything that was unique and great about it. The original was made at roughly the same time as Star Trek and could certainly have looked more convincing / high tech than it did - there was a conscious decision to give it a B-movie aesthetic (with most of the weekly monsters being actors in funny outfits) and the robot may look cheaply made but it was actually beautiful (particularly in the black and white seasons), not something that can be said of the new 'robot'. And the original had a member of the Robinson family who had been a member of the von Trapp family in the Sound of Music for crissake!! I know which of the two shows people will be watching on You Tube or its equivalent in thirty years time (clue: not the re-boot).

Bottom-line: This is not SF!! It's "Neighbours in Space". Do the robots have children together ? Do they survive on minimum wage working as cleaners? Rather a robot than another Tom Cruise clone...I reckon we won't properly explore space until we've really fucked up this planet and then we (as in wealthy people) need to escape in a spaceship leaving a sweet robot to clean up the planet of course who listens to old Louis Armstrong songs and falls in love with another robot. That's my original idea. Nobody better steal it.

Bottom-line II: In the trailer the mother, presumably a scientist, yells, "We're trillions of light-years from home!" WTF?? The entire visible universe has a diameter of roughly 34 billion (with a "b") light-years. If one could, somehow, travel trillions of light-years from Earth one would be in an alternate universe, one in which the laws of physics as we know them would most likely not apply (being outside the smoothing effect of the inflationary period which gave us uniform physics). How can I watch a show which would make such an egregious error? And right after Hawking died! Insult to injury. But someone from the audience reading this post exclaims: "It's okay Manuel; in the next episode it's revealed that the mother in fact suffers from a speech impediment which causes her to substitute a 't' for a 'b' ". The show is set very far in the future. Presumably the set of accepted 'scientific facts' at that time will be at least as widely divergent from the current set of accepted scientific facts as the current set is from the set in existence about 200 years ago. But if you can't agree with this, then fuck it: it's really just a stupid TV programme meant to entertain some people. Don't get too hung up on trainspotter ephemera." Of course this person from the audience said "scientific facts," which is much broader than physics. I used to have a biology textbook from the early 20th century. It was full of interesting "facts" like masturbation being a cause of insanity. One can feel superior reading things like that, but that book made me think about how people hundreds of years from now might read science textbooks from the early 21st century and shake their heads and laugh...Oh well...

Bottom-line III: "Lost in Space 2018" seems a bit shopworn.  If you're a seasoned SF reader, do not watch this crap. I trained for films like these by watching Star Trek for the last 30 years. There isn't a SF film out there that can out-technobabble Trek. In shows like "Lost in Space" it seems like there will always be a 'singularity' or a tachyon field to be face every second episode, but at least everything isn't resolved in a 'climax' with a sonic sodding screwdriver...Oh no, they do it much more realistically by "reversing the polarity of the warp coils" and if that fails chuck "dilithium" crystals at the problem...Why do I keep on watching crap like this??? I know. Because deep down I want to believe these new SF TV Shows are bringing something new to the table...no such luck!

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Space 1999 Reboot: "Interstellar" by Christopher Nolan

How exactly did "solving gravity" allow them to launch NASA and save all human life? Did they develop some kind of anti-gravity? Isn't that theoretically impossible, no matter how much information of an unspecified nature one gathers from inside black holes? If people in the future are capable of building a device that can send messages through time via gravity, why didn't they just send those messages themselves, instead of waiting for someone from the past to stumble upon the device and use it? Come to that, why set this device to focus on the bedroom of a little girl who might be able to take the information to NASA, and not just focus it on NASA? How come Coop looked about 50 when, according to the film, he was no older than 35 when he left Earth?

The beginning was awesome, then the whole space section deliberately makes no sense so that the end can explain it all which may have been just about bearable if the space section wasn't over 2 hours long and wasn't riddled with plot-holes in its science and even the concepts it makes up, and didn't bash you over the head constantly with forced symbolism and metaphors and themes (if I hear 'Do not go gentle' one more time I will attack something). “Interstellar” starts out as season 1 of "Space: 1999" with lots of big ideas and metaphysical concepts, but ends like season two, in fact I was expecting Fred Freiberger to credited as an executive producer. Or more bluntly, this started out "Wrath of Khan" and ends like "The Final Frontier". The end did solve most of the issues the film had plot-wise, but not pace-wise; by the time it gets to the end it's already lost you and you'll probably laugh at how comically idiotic it is. It doesn't help that apart from the father-daughter duo that certainly had its moments, none of the characters have any real depth or are developed and the dialogue is so inane and boring I challenge anyone to quote to me one line that wasn't a trailer line in the entire script. I checked my watch three times during it and jumped out of my chair the second it cut to black. As for the effects, when it does go full 70mm IMAX cinematography it is one of the most stunning-looking films ever made, but in honesty the worlds are pretty bland and there isn't nearly enough time spent on them. If you stitched all the scenes the film hangs its hat on spectacle-wise together you'd probably get about 10-20 minutes max of screen-time. I watched this again when it came to Netflix to get an opinion on it. It's clearly Nolan got way too carried away with himself and it’s a shame because if this was a 1.5 hour simple space-exploration movie with some intrigue and tight dialogue and a lot more IMAX scenes it probably would have been amazing.

I wonder if there's a conflict between Nolan's desire to make emotional films about love and loss, and his love of intricate clockwork plots. Maybe emotional impact needs looser plotting, and clever puzzle plots need a cooler approach. Perhaps you have to choose between making the audience feel and making them think. For me that conflict is why it fell apart in the last reel*.

(*) yes, it was a reel, and seeing that old 35mm flicker which I've spent far too much of my life looking at in the dark did add a lot of emotional impact for me, especially as I'm fairly confident that cinemas won't exist in ten years' time.

Bottom-line: It was filled with plot holes and inconsistent science (even more so than the "The Dark Knight Rises"). Imagine McConaughey in the movie; upon finding himself inside a pocket universe of infinite bookcases, I burst into a very audible laugh and found myself unable to stop for a good few minutes (when I watched this in a movie theatre I thought someone would come and kick me out). Conceptually, I had very high hopes for this film but found completely let down with the last 15 minutes. I wouldn't say that this is a good film but I would say it it's worth watching, even if it's just for the coldly maniacal Matt Damon and the bizarre and strangely funny robots (Did you see that little alcove in the 5-dimensional bookcase? The one with some clueless monkey laughing in a darkened pit? It was me...)

NB1: a friend of mine says “Signs” is much better than this one. Nope. “Signs” is most definitely not superior to “Interstellar”!  “Signs” is a god-awful farce. The first part of it has some well-crafted tension and at least one genuine shock, but then “Shyamalamalamadingdong” farts it all away with an ending so titanically stupid it makes you wonder if he got one of his children to write the script for him. Aliens are so allergic to water it burns them like acid - and they don't wear clothes! Convenient for the humans, and somewhat daft of the aliens to visit a planet with a surface that is 70% water. Why are they naked as well? Are we supposed to believe they can travel across the stars but haven't figured out how to create a raincoat? Nothing about the ending works at all and renders the rest of film a complete nonsense.