We step up into a whole new realm of poitnlessness though when we consider Pirates Of The Caribbean IV: On Stranger Tides. Now I have a love but mainly hate relationship with the first three Pirates films. I am somewhat in awe of the sixth highest grossing film of all time being one which starts with a ten minute sequences culminating in an eight year old child being hung by the neck. There is a fever dream quality to the third film which as you marvel at its general awfulness you cannot help but admire. Luckily “On Stranger Tides” is much more conventional. It feels a little bit more like a big budget pilot for a TV series, now centred around Captain Jack Sparrow, his love/hate pirate gal pal and a mixture of old and new addtions to the Pirate canon.

Somewhere along the line, and I was never quite sure where, Geoffrey Rush’s undead Captain Barbossa went from big bad antagonist to slightly slippery best mates to Captain Jack. Somewhere along the line Blackbeard suddenly became the most dread pirate of all (despite not showing up at all for the pirate conflab where Keira Knightly became King Of The Pirates…) Somehow Ian McShane being Penelope Cruz’s father did not seem totally ridiculous. I am more au fait with murderous mermaids, and yet another hopelessly sappy love story with a chinless wonder, that is the way of the franchise. But when we get to the fountain of youth and pirates frankly refuse to act like pirates, well by then I would have walked out if I hadn’t seen it on DVD. I did fall asleep for about twenty minutes. Perhaps it was twenty minutes when some cheeky orphans all got tortured to death on the Spanish Main thus completely confounding my expectations for the fanchise again. However I think it probably had Depp either poking his own eyebrows out with a Kohl pencil or falling over.

You know who I feel a little bad for (ameliorated by the fact they must have got plenty of money): the writer of the book On Stranger Tides. I’ve not read it but the book was very well received in the eighties, and it just goes to show what happens when you sell all your rights on. A fun swashbuckler may turn into a grotesque pantomime…

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

aka the Sorrows of Young Adric, in which everyone’s favourite wooden doughy doe-eyed teen brainiac hatemonkey Adults Up and Takes One for Evolution, cleverly time-slipping an otherwise entirely unremarkable production-line Cyberman planet-bomb into the actual original Alvarez Impact… At this most traumatically significant transition-time for Likeable 5ive and his Famously Too-Numerous Pals, why not mark/muffle/muddle the Breaking of the Fellowship with the first starring role in kid’s pop culture for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event? Anyway, EarthSoXoR was an ep I’ve heard a LOT, but never seen: SO NOW READ ON

i: These days the Silvery Juggheds are quite dead to me, which is a pity. I think there are three reasons I turned against them. First, they really did scare me when I was a wee meatspace tiny myself on Old Mars/Telos/Mondas/London Underground/I DON’T REMEMBER OK, as they stumbled spongily through dark b/w tunnels killing killing killing: and the residue of terror vanished is often contempt. Third and recent, the Nu-Who protocols of UTTERLOGICWAR are primarily feebly stampy gags across the clichés of easycopy post-digitial computer discourse (“Delete!” and ect and ect and zzzz) which are as soon-to-be-dated as they’re dreary. But second middle and most, there really was often something spookily poetic about the pre-hardbody ‘Bermen. They looked half-formed; they battled their confused mass-larval way out of shrink-wrap cocoons at the end of the first ep; there was something genuinely alien about them, somehow, their humanoid form more an organic pod-production than a factory-line metal macho. Or something (for more on this, see my comments on THE INVASION pt 2 at Helix 8b, at para iii. And of course maybe the middle reason find itself more part of reason three than not: hauntology, as we know, is the soft shift of today’s stupid technology-habit back towards yesterday’s anxious unspoken future-threat dreams blah blah beebaw bleugh. All of which is mainly just to set the scene for my not being v.blown away by this v.famous story…

ii: … Not that 5IVE seems terribly impressed either. In fact he’s distracted from the off: he seems fed up, world-weary and enough not his cheerful easygoing self that viewer unease breeds. The whole section of the first ep where he’s elaborately tormenting Young Adric by telling him nothing about anything — kind of a BadBaker Throwback Obnoxion Tic — is actually quite odd, even as a dramatic-irony set-up for later grief and guilt (if this is indeed what is later depicted). And then when the Juggheds turn up, his exasperated fed-upness doubles. Genuine WhoSchoolers will correct me here, but I believe they’d been absent from DW for quite a while, perhaps because writers had got written them off — absent since old HoboDays possibly, except didn’t BIG HEAD briefly skirmish with a forlorn handful late in the ‘Hed timeline (at which point they are declared scattered and diminished and laughable). None of the companions recognise them whn they first appear in EARTHSHOCK, and 5ive does nothing to clue them in to nature of danger: you’d think Who’s ancient war with the Juggheds (how they see each other; how they joust) is worth a bit more than this backstory insertion than this — if 5ive’s mug is a guide, this is just more boring pest control, just more unending admin, bottling up stupid not-really-robots, protecting stupid self-regardless humanity, shepherding and staving off stupid whiny LOGICBOY…

iii: … who (doctoral unkindness notwithstanding) is a good deal of any stumbling block, is he not? See, once there was Sherlock H, and today there is Sheldon C, and in-between — mightier far than either as a science-fictional archetype — is of course SPOCK: and Matthew Waterhouse was a very young unpracticed semi-non-actor required to realise all kinds of facets of the “reason vs emotion: which will win?” type storyline, NARRATIVE AND THE DIALECTICS OF hem hem PURE LOGIC if you will: facets he was simply not suited to (especially when poorly served by the script). (ps by no means a new topic for me to be picking at, in Helixterms: cf also THE INVASION Part 1 and Part 2 (feat.Cybermen), as well as FOUR TO DOOMSDAY (feat.Adric).) Indeed EARTHSHOCK actually skirts (tho doesn’t really resolving into) a kind of high-level Comi-tragic Logic-Off — Logicboy vs the Top Local Botman in Charge — with inadvertent solo self-sacrifice defeating trollingly psychotic mass exterminationism (hurrah). But (certainly compared with linked eps) not in a way you learn anything much from (unless you’re learning how not to write a moral fable). (Or how to write, period.) Primarily because this may be because JugHead-in-Chief is actually a terrifically pompous — and really NOT very rational — fellow, giving his speeches strangely over-emphatic readings and constantly re-improvising a poorly controlled plan to to destroy a planet to disrupt a conference so that he can humiliate and torment the fleshly (“That’s sadistic!” squeaks Tegan at one point. “No, it’s scientific!” declares the Jugghead serenely… ) (Adding: I’m advised by wikipedia that the actor, David Banks, recapped this performance several times and became cultishly beloved for the way he says “Excellent!”…)

[UPDATE INSERT (guide to cliffhanger-structure):
a: Danger in the cave! It's latex pervobots with a bomb
b: Bomb defused but NOES! It's invading cybermen offplanet, and the Doctor is being framed for one of their murders
c: he's now onside with the (good) crew members but the freighter is itself a massive flying bomb
d: adric will save the day but oh at what cost?
e: DINOGEDDON]

iv: Sadly, 90% of Real Actual Proper Good Drama is how deftly you get yr heroes and villains on and off-stage, and into the binds and conflicts youwant them in. <--- if this isn't a well-worn dramacraft apothegm it bloody ought to be, if only to underscore why eps like this -- with quite simple cliffhanger structures -- are so tiresomely underwhelming. The cast is both numerous and diversely teamed: all teams ceaselessly splitting up, often quite unnecessarily. The Juggheds we encounter are of course part of a vast army united in vast strategic purpose, but an intricate localised part of this army, with much to do, little of it on point (viz why have they been busy murdering crew members if they want the vast plan to remain secret until too late? Why leave scary homicidal android guarding a defusable bomb instead of ACTUALLY HIDING THE BOMB BETTER etc); the cave-exploring team of course split up, to make it easier for the homicidal kinkybots to pick them off; the freighter crew somewhat ditto but this does give a sense of the sheer SCALE of this ship (=15,000 containers-worth); and the Doctor-Companion dynamics entail their (apparently) not even wanting to move around as a gang, in despite of the demands of the circumstances. To the point where the TARDIS-team atmosphere seems downright haunted and peculiar -- especially when you recall this ep comes after BLACK ORCHID aka NYSSA’S DREAM, with its rich oneiric foreshadowing of doom. There’s a very little bit of me tempted to argue that the Doctor is so distracted and distanced with Adric because, in some intuitive pre-cog subconscious fashion, he *knows* that the puir wee prodigy is not long for this world, and already subconsciously blames himself (I don’t believe this really, I think it’s just muddle-headed scriptwriting)…

v: Anyway time for a direct and simple positive yip yip: Beryl Reid! As a bored and cynical but actually totally competent captain of avast merchant vessel of space, well aware of the dickishness of her crew and the general uselessness of regulations. This includes an excellent reveal-surprise at the first appearance (SPOILER: you’re totally not expecting the ship’s captain to be a woman, let alone this woman). Beryl have made a good quasi-companion actually, Lethbridge-Stewart-style (ie a constant character over a longer arc; not necessarily a TARDIS inhabitant).

vi: various unrelated observations. 1: It’s merely anomalous and quaint given that the ep’s set centuries in Earth’s future, but the various computer tracking technologies, in the cave and on the ship. are also all quite poetic in their blinky bleepy simplicity (= more Hauntology 101 of course). 2:
i liked the bogus time-science round the ship’s engine — that it’s anti-matter contained by a flickeringly reconfigured matter shell, rebuilt every micro-second by “computer controlled electronics”. 3: wai oh wai when we encounter a human traitor the Juggheds have suborned do we never see the anomalous charm and guile they must have put into the seduction? How on earth do traitors ever fall for it? (They’re not all dimwits — cf The Invasion — though this one is. 4: I am a bit fascinated by the sociocultural relationship the ‘Heds have to their blackly clad Latex pervodroids . And (related!) 5: why does the droid-killing technique leave such a slimy — and recognisable — mess?

vii: Writing this up has been of a sluggish slog — partly bcz I’m getting back into the rhythm after a too-long lay-off, but also because I find this quite a hard ep to get to grips with. It’s a BIG IMPORTANT STORY (in long arc terms) without being a particuarly good one: certainly not a well told one. Ideas-wise, it’s potentially really rich — actually probably TOO rich for one four-parter — but I *really* feel I’m projecting an awareness of this richness onto the writers (except it seems very unfair to withhold it: none of this is especially subtle stuff, and — see Helix-Eps already linked — it’s all over early Who, much better grasped). Just to bring focus back to DINOGEDDON to make the point: I genuinely can’t decide if I want them to have made more of this underlying idea, or kept it as a (ideally more deft) Amazing Reveal. The latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event; but the fact of all the mass-produced JuggHeds struggling out of their shrink-wraps as they power up — satirical metaphor ahoy! of human extinction by container-freighter carbon-footprint white-goods consumerism! — would have been very hard indeed for a NuDoc overseer to overlook.

Plus also:

(^^^this exciting aspect — Robot vs Dinosaurs! Fite!! — is a kind of buried conceptual easter egg, except to no apparent purpose)

Putting a lot more thought into this issue than I suspect they ever did — no there is nothing at all wrong with this imbalance, plz to bug-off — I think there’s two aspect to the Matthew Waterhouse problem. First is that logic vs emotion — whiskered as it is in DW terms — gains a lot of potential once a major character is a mathematically brilliant child, in terms of big-question SF and in terms of sit-com misunderstanding. (What Jim Parsons brings to Dr Sheldon Cooper is a layered awareness of different modes and speed and qualities of intelligence, types of thinking and awareness and knowledge that aren’t necessarily transferrable, sensibilities associated with distinct age-groups that not everyone is well attuned to. There’s a constant in-body comedy of incongruity, as if the adult has to catch with the small boy in him, or vice versa: types of “getting it” that pass across a face at different speeds, or pull a body all the different different clownish ways.)

Second is sadder, really: MW actually has a very sweet and engaging face. When he’s not speaking or acting, you quite often really really want to like him (sometimes to hug him). Which possibly powers the abreaction (though others are know get very protective… )

NEXT DAY UPDATE: I say above that the “latter allows us to get maximum impact from the Cretaceous-Traumatic Adric Event” but realised as I was bit-by-bit tweaking this entry that this over-compressed reference to the climax actually indicates why the story doesn’t work — which is that it has two Amazing Reveal climaxes combined into just one shock ending, except one is pure Daft Robo vs Dino Thrill Power WHHHEEEE!, and the other is an emotionally important milestone in the long-game unfolding of DW’s understanding of himself, his behaviour, his responsibilities, his failings, his contradictions… The two trample all over one another, in tone and resonance and usefulness.

SECOND UPDATE: I’ve been tweaking piecemeal for two days to clarify and amplify — apologies to anyone reading while this was happening, it’s very unprofessional! The untweaked version is hereat LJ if you want to check what I first wrote. Though it has a slightly different nose there. I feel like there’s more to say, but I’ve leave it for comments.

Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hears of the existence of a peculiar ancient artefact and in the course of further investigation, prompted either by avarice or simple scholarly curiousity, unwittingly awakens some eldritch horror who torments him, often to the death, either as punishment for his greed or out of mere supernatural malice.

On first approach The Tractate Middoth seems like it’s going to follow this pattern nicely. The title obviously refers to the artefact which will cause all the trouble, and it’s nicely esoteric and sinister sounding. And on the very first line our antiquary is introduced, a Mr John Eldred, elderly and male of course and sporting a fine set of piccadilly weepers (a wonderful term whose meaning is surely apparent even if you’ve never come across it before) and indeed seeking after the titular Tractate. But he is unable to procure it for someone else has got there first, someone perhaps of sinister aspect. Has Mr Eldred already unwittingly set malevolent forces in motion? Is there a ghoul in waiting for him?  However, our expectations are quickly upset. The person who has a nasty encounter with whatever supernatural bogeyman the Tracate has perhaps empowered is not Eldred but an innocent library assistant. Eldred is forced to leave the library empty-handed, and to confirm the deviation from normal form he also leaves the story for a while, and the action turns to the assistant, William Garrett.

After his nasty fright – of which more in a moment – Garrett has to take a little sabbatical in which he stumbles, with a coincidence (or is it?) that may cause us to raise an eyebrow, upon the real mystery of this tale. The mother and daughter he fortuitously crosses paths with, a Mrs and Miss Simpson, are trying to find a will left by the mother’s evil uncle, Dr John Rant, that leaves his considerable estate to her. In the absence of the document the estate has passed over to her cousin, by her account a rather mean fellow. It seems the will has been hidden in a book – and here I offer no prizes for guessing Mr John Eldred’s relation to Mrs Simpson, or why he is trying to get his hands on the Tractate. It’s the little setup with Garrett and the Simpsons which is most intriguing though, and where the true form of this story becomes apparent. It resembles less your average Jamesian tale of eldritch horrors and more an Agatha Christie mystery, with its wronged third parties and a cosy fireside chat where they put their problems to the sleuth who will set everything to rights. And crucially, as with many a good detective story there is a Macguffin. Not the will, since the specific nature of that document is rather critical to the construction of this tale, but the Tractate Middoth itself. This mysterious and eerie sounding text is utterly irrelevant to the plot, Dr Rant could have hidden the will inside a copy of The Boy’s Big Book of Hebrew Stories and things would have played out exactly the same. And in fact that’s more or less what he did – the Tractate Middoth might sound sinister but it is no Necronomicon. Middoth or middot means measurements in Hebrew, and it’s just a tract of the Talmud that deals with the measurements and customs of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. A drier, less occult text could scarcely be conceived. Have a read, it starts off pretty racy with the temple officer beating and burning the clothes of any guard asleep at their post, but it soon settles down into dedicated cubit-counting action.

As to the detective story, of course it leaves a lot to be desired, but James wasn’t really trying to become the new Conan Doyle. The mystery is set and solved within a couple of pages, and all that remains for Mr Garrett is a rather frantic race against time, for an outcome he is not even sure of – he has to get the book off Mr Eldred, but how? Fortunately despite its detective trappings this is still a ghost story, and the ghost does his work for him.

So, what of this ghost? For me the key feature of James’ stories, more than the academic attention to detail, the fondly drawn characters or the authentic settings, lies in the brief but precise moments of terror. There are rarely more than one or two per story, and they are often described in merely a line or two, but they are usually exquisitely chilling or even horrific. The shocks in this tale are not quite top five material, but effective nonetheless. The first is the appearance of the figure that causes Mr Garrett to have his little turn. He doesn’t take in the lower part of the face but the upper is “perfectly dry”, and the deep-sunk eyes are covered with cobwebs. Those cobwebby eyes are the main image you come away with and it’s wonderfully ghastly but I wonder if the first part of the description is on reflection even creepier. Why describe a face as dry? I start to think what once-human creature, dead for over twenty years, might have a face completely devoid of perspiration or errr grease, or indeed any means of producing it. And why take care to point out that he didn’t see the lower part of the face? Well it would be quite difficult to see something that wasn’t there in the first place…

The second, deadly, visitation is described in an even more circumspect fashion than the first. “Two arms enclosing a mass of blackness” envelop and smother mean Mr Eldred. Perhaps this isn’t an image to make us shiver before turning out the bedside light, not as much as the first at least, but that mass of blackness bespeaks ineffable hadean horrors. And it means that despite our subverted expectations, the aged antiquary does get his comeuppance at the end. But why, exactly? Comeuppance for what? The usual ambiguities and vagaries of intention are at play here. Dr Rant was a bad man, and Mrs Simpson said she thought he preferred her cousin, a similar meanie, although Rant told her himself he wasn’t very fond of him. And he told her he wanted her and Mr Eldred to start on equal terms in this little puzzle, yet with his knowledge of and dealings in books surely Eldred had the upper hand. Perhaps Rant feels he made things too easy for Eldred, and came back to even things out. And Eldred seemed to know who was after him, although he was less discomfited with this knowledge than the protagonists in other stories. What had or hadn’t he seen? Who were the witnesses to the will and what (if anything) happened to them? Questions abound, as always, but they merely add to the mystery. (However I was pleased when, after thinking it slightly suspicious that a train leaving around two and taking two hours might arrive as evening was drawing in, I turned back to the beginning and found the story starts “Towards the end of an autumn afternoon…”. Trivial, but it shows that you can’t blame loose ends on any woolly thinking of James.)

Finally there is a little surprise at the end, a secret kernel to the tale we don’t discover till the very last line – well, assuming you didn’t see it coming beforehand, the clues are there. Wrapped in the detective story inside a ghost story is, it turns out, a romance! A most unusual subject for James, but tackled in his usual fashion by leaving more – far more – to the imagination than is spelled out in the text.

Together at last

This entry is sponsored by the letter ‘s’ and could possibly come under the catch-all of ‘stew;’ what I’m actually here to talk to you about, though, are SWEDE and SAUSAGES.

Oh sure, Sausages aren’t always cheap per se- at two 8 packs for a fiver in most supermarkets’ upper-end range they’re no tomato sauce for absolute value extraction but there are few foodstuffs that actually count as widely nutritious and which the very most expensive form of was a £20 pack made of fillet steak and champagne. In fact, there’s realistically no meat to rival them.

EVERY MONTH

Even if you want to go more upmarket, though, you’d still have to have a pretty substantial brood to not be able to feed an entire table with leftovers for about £3. No mince is that cheap, pork belly would be a mean offering and you’d struggle to get enough mackerel within budget.

The sausage is undoubtedly cheap and although probably not the single healthiest thing you’ve ever eaten, genuinely nutritious. You can make any meat into it, you can even make them involving no meat at all- the wonderful combination of breadcrumbs and some kind of fatty protein, herbs and pepper is consistently delicious. There’s not a lot you can say that for, that’s cheap; I’ve had some rank old chick peas in my time, some dodgy burgers (admitedly, mostly from ~gastronoms~ hanging the meat too long before mincing) and yet never, ever a sausage I didn’t like. Pork ones, beef ones, venison ones, vegan ones, Linda McCartney’s strangely fibrous vegetarian ones, saveloys, frankfurters, chorizo, Bernard Matthews, toulouse, cumberland whirls and those glorious little sweaty cocktail ones you can get as a delicious protein hit, ready-cooked in the cold meats section. Untraceable provenance, unusual colour, found down the back of the freezer, bought from Gregg’s in a moment of hungover bliss and always a mouth-burning, fatty explosion of joy.

Which brings me to the slight controversy of swedes. I don’t mean the desire of some to call them rutabaga, I mean that they perhaps do not have the taste consistency of sausages. The swede, for a basic root vegetable, is a difficult proposition and there’s no doubt that it’s if not an acquired taste, a required skill to make it taste good rather than agedly rooty.

It’s definitely cheap- the canonical offering in any teen narrative where home economics suggests food budgeting but it’s not necessarily all that lovable in many of its forms. For a start, there’s the need to hack into it, which requires specialist tools and a strong arm.

When I lived in a bedsit with few kitchen accoutrements I once managed to peel and slice a swede using a butterknife and sheer desperation that this had to somehow to be turned into dinner but I’m pretty confident the physical effects of this act will haunt me in later life. While I’m sure some industrial-strength peelers exist that can face the 3mm thick armour plating of the turnip. Like squashes, the delicate flesh inside is contained by something best addressed with a meat cleaver.

Unlike squashes, said delicate flesh is also a ball of fleshy, fibrous matter that has been packed so densely as to perplex physics. After you have smashed, hacked and grunted your way in the worst fact of it is that what you have is, undeniably, swede. Due to the aforementioned density, it needs boiling or roasting for longer than most root veg and realistically requires a parboil before frying. Then again, at least it doesn’t need soaking overnight, then boiling for forty minutes before you can do anything with it.

The best way to get your swede is of course to hang around by the pre-prepared vegetables waiting for bag of it to be reduced to 19p; if you’ve got no time for that though, it’s still worth the sweat and tears to prepare the damn thing to curry it. I think swede might be the only root vegetable that (I suspect) would cook well in a tandoori oven and if you haven’t parboiled some, drained it, thrown it back into the pan with a splosh of fat (oil/ghee/butter/whatever) with some fenugreek seeds, chilli and garlic then you are missing out.

Tangy and tough, it holds its own against even the most overwhelming spices; no point in going easy on it, hammer it into the roasting pan with mace and ginger and throw cayenne all over it. It works as an accomplice to buttery potato mash, which can dilute some of the woody flavour but why try and trick it into things rather than using it?

One of the best things about swede is it can take a lot of fat near it without becoming greasy, which may give you an idea of where this is going. The marriage of delicious sausages and delicious swede is the cheap equivalent of a steaming piece of aged venison; flavoursome and warming no matter how cheaply you’ve had to buy the constituent parts.

Alternatively, tis the season for a ruddy enormous stew you imagine you’ll have leftovers on:

Spoiler: there will not be leftovers

There are three big problems with Season Of The Witch, only one of which is that the Donovan track the film is named after does not turn up in the film. Nic Cage, in phoning it in mode, is a real problem in the film. As a world weary knight, who has seen it all, returning disillusioned from the crusades, there was a real chance for more crazy Nic to turn up. In particular, the trauma of killing no end of innocent people would leave any knight cynical, prone to a quip and also a fervent non-believer in all things biblical and supernatural. Ron Perlman, as his sidekick, gets the tone just right. Cage just plays it dour as he transports a suspected witch across country to try to solve a curse. Clare Foy plays the witch, locked in her little travelling cage, and plays the ambiguity well. Except…

The main problem with Season Of The Witch is the pre-credit sequence where a witch is tested, classic style, with a good dunking. The standard dead body is them examined later, at which point the corpse comes to life, beats up the clergyman and proves firmly that in the medieval world of the film, witchcraft is definitely real. Its a nice way to start the film, a good jolt to the system. But then removes what is the basic conceit of the film -is Clare Foy a witch or not? We know she is a witch because if the film has already established that witchcraft is real, why would she not be? It makes no sense to the film to establish the reality of witchcraft to not use it. Thus stripping the film of its central tension. Is this young girl being needlessly tortured? Well no, because she really is a witch.

Season Of The Witch should be a schlocky bit of fun, but a combination of Cage not getting in to it, and this stupid lack of suspense leaves it as one of the dullest films of last year. Cheapish CGI, and a real lack of any driving suspense don’t help. Nothing highlights how poor this film is than the twenty minute sequence where the party has to cross a shoddy rope bridge. Bernard LEvin present Now Get Out Of That did this king of thing in a much more exciting way. There is no suspense, no cinematic magic, it whole films ends up feeling considerably longer than a season.

Oh and Nic Cage fans – note that the other possibility for this list Drive Angry – survives due to an excellent bad guy, a nice turn from Amber Heard and proper use of exploitation 3D (stuff is thrown at the screen). Nic himself is pretty poor in it.

You can see what they’ve got on the bar at @OldFountainAles

The disgraced children’s author William Mayne died in 2010, some 57 years after the publication of Follow the Footprints, the first of his more than a hundred books, none of them for adults. A final book came out the year of his death, Every Dog (puissant title in the circumstances), and I haven’t read it yet, though I will. I’ll talk a little about his downfall at the close of this post, and doubtless more later, but what I actually propose to undertake is a gradual reading of these books, such as I can track down, starting with a rereading of the 20-odd that I own and know.

A Swarm in May (1955)

“Five shillings,” said Owen. “Well done, ye!” That was a choir-school phrase: no one knew who had invented it. It was a sign of joy and approval.

Swarm is Mayne’s third book: the first of an admired set of four set in a cathedral school (he went to Canterbury C.S. as a boy): since the cathedral holds services all year round, choristers have to stay in school for at least some of the holidays, or return early. So the setting is emptied: half-staffed, all-male, with Owen, the youngest choirboy — perhaps nine, helped some of the time by an older boy — uncovering curious and unsettling items very material to a bee-keeping ritual rendered vestigial back when Henry VIII abolished the monasteries.
So, buildings with hidden reaches you can creep down into, in which unexpected things are secreted, forgotten or never known by all the grown-ups round you: flashes here of Kipling’s Stalky: which continue in the depiction of teachers (as slightly absurd and eccentric adult cartoons, half-deliberate self-conscious parodies of themselves); in the well observed and witty delineation of trends and memes and traditions and catchphrases in the language the boys speak to one another; and of course Mayne shares Kipling’s fascination with the detailed arcana of specialist knowledge and technique (the jargoned world of choirs and organplayers; the physical feel of the practice of bee-keeping). But really this is a FAR far gentler world than Kipling’s; one in which loneliness very lightly touched on in an ebb and flow of communal affection, and agon (such as it is) uncomplicatedly (and sensibly) worked through.

The Twelve Dancers (1962)

It was no good taking Porky by the hand. The way to lead him was to walk in front. Porky would seem to look at everything else, but he would follow. He would follow anything in a wandering way. Once he had followed a kindly big dog down into the village, all the way from the house. The dog had taken him to its home and then gone to sleep. Ma had rescued Porky, and he had had to walk all the way home as well.

Dancers is set in a semi-isolated Welsh valley, somewhere at the head of the Severn, some not very specified time in the 50s — apparently no cars or radios, let alone TVs, but there is a Queen’s head on the coins: Marlene is new to the village, her mother a cleaner in various local households and a single parent (no backstory on this, or the reasons for their arrival). It’s Marlene’s first encounter with the yearly Traditional Dance, and she’s initiated into this intricate village affair involving girls at the school, curious ‘doors’ of various heights built into the church wall, and a semi-buried old dancefloor atop a nearby hill. The dance-steps (direction and number) decode into a sort of treasure map that will perhaps rediscover a lost or misplaced or deliberately concealed item — a cup — and resolve an ancient dispute over ownership of a tranche of land, known as Commons Wood. If the young-ish local landowner finds and claims it, he believes the land will revert to him: said land is probably not worth much, and he’s really more interested in the archeological riddle, but unsurprisingly there’s a certain crackle of class conflict as various schoolchildren side with or against him in this project (as — in the background — do their parents). Dance as enactment of tension, and as resolution: in the event, everything comes out nice (in fact the ritual indirectly enables a cross-class wedding), but it’s not hard to see this book as a forerunner of Alan Garner’s far more fraught The Owl Service (1967), where the children are rather older, and sexual tension and jealousy power the (explicit) magic that will be uncovered.

A Parcel of Trees (1963)

“I don’t how you’re going to make out at all,” said Mum. “Or I wouldn’t if we didn’t all feel the same. It’s the weather.”
“It’s the dreadful life we lead,” said Susan.
“What do you mean?” said Mum. “You’re the dreadful life, lying about like an old stump.”

Again rooted in a potential conflict about property: the “parcel of trees” of the title is a slice of disputed property cut off from the family garden by the intrusion of a railway line many decades before, and now only accessible through a culvert. Susan (14) discovers this secret near-garden and — when amiably challenged as a trespasser by railway officials — decides to prove that legal ownership has in fact reverted away from the railway company. With the help of a solicitor neighbour (working for free because it’s an unusual and interesting case) she uncovers a pertinent slice of recent very unofficial local history; villagers of very various ages semi-illicitly using the land for several quite unorthodox purposes. Woven into this is the portrait of Susan, her little sister, mum and dad, an odd-because-ordinary family who no more perfectly jigsaw than any non-fictional family (they live over dad’s bakery and must all do shopstuff when it’s busy). What Mayne catches so well is the affectionate combativeness and allusive abruptness of the speech within a loving close group like this, complete with subtle undercurrents of rivalry and rebellion routinised into play squabbles; and underpinning Susan’s need for the intimacy of solitude, probably Mayne’s deepest subject. (The illustrations, which contribute at least equally to the soft-spoken modern sensibility, are by Margery Gill.)

Sand (1964)

The kettle was boiling on a gasring behind the counter, where it had boiled for a century. It had boiled away every layer of paint on the wood nearby, and the steam had removed a deep hollow in the wood as well.

Sand is an amazing book, quite unlike any children’s novel before it, at least by any other author I can quickly bring to mind. At one (not unfamiliar) level, it’s a sketch of the fascination and antipathy between secondary modern boys and grammar school girls, in a small never-named northern coastal town — and as such fits into its time, the time of kitchen sink cinema and Coronation Street, the Beatles and, well, Ballard, actually. Because — in its deceptive, even diffident way — it’s a closer cousin to Ballard, Beckett and Camus than anything you’d surely expect to encounter in children’s books, at least those with Jill MacDonald’s cheery pop art Puffin on its cover. Of course, Mayne has a greater interest and thus a superior ear for family-based or school-directed banter than any of these better celebrated ‘grown-up’ modernist counterparts: whose flaw this is you can decide yourself, I guess. The town is situated huddled beside some great sand spar: it is being eaten, month by month, hour by hour, by its own dunes, and — behind the mildly prankish goings-on — it’s very much about the wearisome allure of entropy and erosion, the implacability of non-human forces. While it’s the fourth of four books reviewed here in which some aspect of the past is dug unexpectedly up, it’s the first so far in which the omipresent modern media eye on same plays a role.

****

So can we extract anything yet, from this small and faintly random selection? Actually perhaps not so random: Swarm did much to establish his early reputation: there were four choir school books, and they tidy pretty safely into an already popular a form of middle-class children’s literature: the school story in which “school” very much DOESN’T mean the kind of school most British kids were going to (he would increasingly break from this pattern). The comfortable presence of C. Walter Hodges as illustrator surely helped his recognition. Meanwhile Dancers, Parcel and Sand appear to be be the first three he published with Puffin books, whose role in developing the kidlit canon in the 60s was enormous. This was when Mayne soared into his ‘imperial’ phase; this was when my mum, a passionate amateur expert in children’s book who bought me all three, was paying close and interested attention.

It’s easy — and not especially surprising — to begin to discern themes over a decade’s writing: local ritual and the everyday linked via amateur archeology, generally by children, for example, as well as the persistent idea that digging up and understanding the past can transform a deliberately unmelodramatic but never mundane present. A delicately and often wittily sensual sense of place, and of willed solitude in that place; well sketched location as a kind of flight from company (and vice versa).

And then there’s the fact of his disgrace, and how it fits into all this. In 2004, in his mid-70s, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls, sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and placed on the sex offenders’ register for life. The obituary in the Independent contained further detail: “Accusations of indecent assault made in 1973 and 1999 finally came to a head in 2004, when he was taken to court by a farmer’s wife in her fifties whom he had befriended when she was eight. She described being entranced by Mayne, but there were times when her erstwhile friend, normally so kind, witty and affectionate, would force himself on her. This abuse lasted for six years; five other witnesses came forward with similar accounts. Evidence of his criminal behaviour for 15 years from 1960 onwards was overwhelming, leading to a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.”

So there’s the question Tom Ewing discussed several years ago on FT (in a Popular piece on Gary Glitter): “Take William Mayne, for instance, a children’s book writer of immense imaginative and empathic skill, and also convicted of serially abusing fans of his books. Is the thing that makes Mayne an excellent writer for children – his ear and head for how they talk and think – also what made him an effective paedophile, able to win and exploit their trust?” Comments threads on reports of the conviction divide, understandably angrily: anonymous posters arrive to say that they knew Mayne personally (the real Mayne), and the trial was a travesty, in fact and as reported: because he was much worse even than the verdict revealed him, or exactly the opposite, that he was innocent, and maligned. I’m in no position to adjudicate, and don’t plan to: I won’t pretend I’m bringing much new as regards sexual psychology or criminology to this story, and I’m sure I won’t be unearthing relevant new facts in the case.

But I do know a little about books and writing, and indeed about books and reading. All fiction — all writing — is a matter, at some level, of control and manipulation: marks made on a page to nudge a reader from sentence to sentence and page to page, effects conjured in head and heart, to fuse or collide in patterns, some open and undecided, some tried and tested, many much harder to categorise so glibly. It’s not forcing a pun to link the word “author” with the word “authority”: with such easy-to-miss power comes the risk of easy-to-miss irresponsibility, and anecdotes are legion, as we all know, of the ugly behaviour of authors. Nor can it entirely be a shock to recognise that someone who diverts the greater part of their energies to the acts and inner lives of folk that are made up is not always paying intelligent mind to the lives and wounds of those that aren’t.

Mutual misunderstanding was not a new topic in fiction — or even in children’s fiction — but surely few explored it with Mayne’s insight, humour, gentle delicacy or subtlety: how children are not party to adult agendas, compromises, habits and assumptions; and of course vice versa, that in growing up adults have very often lost or set aside a valuable way of seeing the world. That there’s a thread of trust that marks the path everyone is treading, and that this thread is sometimes very fragile indeed. Can sympathetic intelligence and wisdom — wisdom precisely about such trust — sit alongside deep selfishness and a capacity to abuse? Well, yes, sometimes I think it can.

Whether or not it’s the relevant truth in this case — I’m not competent to adjudicate, as I say — it seems to me challengingly important, because so challengingly dreadful, to propose that a genuinely lovely writer, a writer deeply worth reading, by children and adults, can at the same time be an abusive man who betrayed trust and responsibility. We’re all contradictory, and writers are especially well used to firewalling the sensitive imagination off from the reaches of life that are experienced rather than imagined, for all kinds of reasons, good and bad. And all writers — and this certainly includes me — write as much for an imagined reader as the readers they happen to know and meet in life. Who were Mayne’s imagined readers? What do his books tell us?

I plan to go back to the books, in all respectful caution, and reread and talk about them. They meant a great deal to me as a child, partly because my mother took such joy in them; I’m a grown-up now: I see many things differently. What’s gained, and what’s gone lost?

Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. Actually she was RCA’s biggest artist before Elvis arrived and the World Changed™ — but even in all the battle, begun in the 80s really, to rediscover undismissive unconfused perspective on pre-Elvis time, nothing apparently re-centred Eartha where she belongs in it.

Not sure how de-confusing it is, but there’s a very intriguing interview with Kitt in Vol.One of RE/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Music”, where she casually demolishes pretty much EVERYONE’s received cartography of values and politics and pop. Certainly she stomped all over LBJ’s notions of the politics of pop: in 1968, Lady Bird Johnson had invited her (along with 50 other women working in various communities across the nation) to the White House, to discuss what black kids want, and what could be done about it. And Kitt told her: in terms she apparently never expected to hear, from a mouth and a compass-point she was (one imagines) quite unaccustomed to processing. So yes, Kitt at that time belonged — as the White House promo department had judged — to a passing age of Las Vegas-y mainstream entertainment, still hugely popular but very much NOT the standard-bearers of the rising young rock-focused political wave. So what was causing riots in urban neighborhoods, Kitt was asked: Vietnam, of course. Reward: being made presidential persona non grata, and banishment from the US light-entertainment universe for many years.

Her fame had started outside America, and she didn’t need its unoffended custom to thrive: in fact she’d spent the years after the war on the left bank in Paris, in the kinds of dives that James Baldwin and and Jean Gabin and Sartre and de Beauvoir could doubtless be found. And well, even setting aside this handily existentialist self-education, the pop-cultural mainstream that rock was busy scorning was surely at least as just as fascinatingly uneasy and complicated in its wit and seemingly shallow opulence as any of the noisier pop that followed, muffling it.

Thursday’s Child is the 1957 LP that “Just an Old-Fashioned Girl” comes from, and it’s the LP my dad had at home (and I have now). It’s a concept album — as so many 50s LPs were — but there’s a sophisticated wit, a subtlety of the unspoken to the concept that’s an unfathomable distance from anything we seemingly habitually associate with this term today. The title phrase comes from the old nursery rhyme: Monday’s child fair of face, Tuesday’s full of grace, and so on. Thursday’s has “far to go” — and the LP is presented as a succession of places Eartha’s been and what she’s seen, dance troupes and night-clubs in New York, Hollywood and Vegas, but also Paris, Istanbul, south and central America. And it’s genuinely an “album” — that’s to say a selection and cross-section of unexpected styles of song, a succession of snapshots and atmosphere — that take us from the delicate, intelligent, definitely somewhat threatening vixen on the cover (shades of Roxy Music) back into the past that made her. Exotic imagined glimpses of the bohemian life and loves of a dancer or singer — of the kind of interzone that gets called “transgressive”, at least by writers determined to drive all joy and energy from the world — further conjoined with an an extract from EK’s first autobiography, also called Thursday’s Child, printed on the reverse of the sleeve (and blurrily reproduced below). As you can read, it’s an intensely evocative passage about Kitt’s mother (a displaced sharecropper, part black, part Cherokee), leading through two barefoot children through the South Carolina night, trying to find somewhere they can all sleep safely. EK was fathered by rape, by the white son of the owner of the farm she was born on — and more or less completely disowned by future stepfathers. As a child she was often dismissed as the ‘Yella Gal’ and — as she wrote and often noted — spurned on all sides; and so she ran away to all the world, to punish all such tiny-minded local bigotry, by becoming an inescapable global success.

Part of the thread of this possibility you can trace via Kitt’s conductor-producer for Thursday’s Child: a New Yorker called Henri René, French mother, German father, musical director for the international wing of RCA Victor from the late 30s, leading his own orchestra from the 40s, he’s best known today — better known than she is in some places — as a pioneer of the “bachelor pad” mode of wittily arranged, lushly recorded music (in “living stereo”), a sequence of LPs released across the 50s, their titles alone a muddled key to the story: Paris Loves Lovers; Passion in Paint; Music for Bachelors (cover feat.Jayne Mansfield in a negligee); Music for the Weaker Sex; Compulsion to Swing; Riot in Rhythm; Listen to Henri Rene (Dynamic Dimensions; Portfolio for Easy Listening; In Love Again; Melodic Magic; White Heat (ha!); and Swinging 59….

The wit is a deeply musically informed wit — the strength and allure of the LP is its breadth, as much as anything — and the “lushness” a very deft use indeed of new-found studio possibility, so that orchestration has a precision and 3D stereo presence in and around the singer. Kitt switches between personas and deliveries and the arrangements do likewise, cinematic jumpcuts that juxtapose, undercut, gather and playfully debate, ironise — “ironise” in an important way, that’s so common in 40s and 50s film, that doesn’t necessarily have a jargon term, at least when it’s deployed in non-film music, where the “soundtrack” amplifies the emotion of a scene or an action or a section in a story by being its exact opposite.

(The classic example comes from Hitchcock: the circus music rising to a loud climax during a nasty murder at fairground’s edge: the sound obscures and distracts from the material nastiness of the story, and — one step back — foregrounds the unconcerned happy world as it carries on having fun only yards away, which of course means that as viewers — two steps back, as it were — we’re complicit in these two clashing worlds, and thrown doubly hard against the pathos of the victim by sharing the last sounds she hears, and recognising her solitude…)

The layered, lush, learned irony here is an invocation — as much as anything else — of the ugly side of a woman’s success in this kind of world: and this is the use of irony I want to stress here — the conscious, amused, wise adult alertness to the fact that every one of us is embedded in conflicting worlds and roles and perspective, torn between loyalties and obligations we agree, for the sake of moment-by-moment social enrichment, to share and acknowledge. This is where the intensity and horror of Hitchcock’s irony arrives, because it demonstrates how often we fail to negotiate a settlement between clashing worlds; but this is also where the release and dark joy of Eartha Kitt’s irony operates, which insists that sometimes we can, and it’s thrillingly and heartening when this happens — just look at her!

Let’s get back to to ‘Old Fashioned-Girl’, a song that meets the contradictions of past and present head on, and playfully explores the way role-play suffuses our response to both. Or we can dig sideways a bit more — noting for oblique confirmation that René’s White Heat, made for Imperial after he left RCA, includes a version of the Woody Woodpecker themetune: and actually this (of all things) brings us back . Because the best comparison I can make for the image stream in “Fashioned” is decadence-era Tex Avery: as he eased himself away from the nihilistic anarcho-libidinal energy of his earlier cartoon shorts, the director made a group of animations that seem somehow to predict (and tease) the Bachelor Pad set, even though they’re not more than streams of quickfire visual puns, each at once cutely witty and instantly forgotten, an affectionate giggle at modern market culture as pure silly cornucopia: The House of Tomorrow; the Car of Tomorrow; the Farm of Tomorrow; and TV of Tomorrow

“I want an old fashioned car, a cerise Cadillac/
Long enough to put a bowling alley in the back”

“I like the old fashioned flowers, violets are for me/
Have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany”

“Our little home will be quaint as an old parasol/
And instead of carpet I’ll have money wall to wall“

The arrangement’s terrific: a dense harpsichord clatter bouncing behind her, as speed-read gesture at the “olden days” (and at more recent craft-enclave opulence: Wanda Landowska playing Bach on harpsichord had been released as an album of 78s in a pioneering subscription issue before the war, the cognoscenti paying upfront for a quality document that would never have received mainstream release). She sings the words bell-clear, enunciating like a guide to elegant ways to speak, as the words spool out, relentlessly, into an impishly self-mocking cartoon of material-girl cupidity, Avery-style images as sung sight-gags (“I’m just a pilgrim at heart, oh so pure and genteel/Watch me in Las Vegas while I’m at the spinning wheel“). The fold-over irony of the role she plays not so much straight as a wide-eyed and coolly understated innocence, holding your gaze, challenging you to call her on it all. As emphasis on the elegance there’s even just trace of a mimicked accent when she sings “Old” — and it reminds you how hard it is to guess or hear her own real accent anyway; her default mode isn’t not quite as wildly mutable as Nicki Minaj, say, but nevertheless they’re soul-sisters.

Eartha was hot and she was witty and quick, and her voice darts across backdrops of cartooned identity; a knowing actress flickering between roles, momentarily sketching them, chuckling about them, chuckling at you so fascinated by the growling codeshifts, as we’d call it today. “Old Fashioned Girl” is a portrait of a type — impishly material-girl in the way it mocks cliches of piety — but it’s self-mocking too, mocking the type, mocking the performer sketching the type, mocking the audience the performer has in the palm of her paw, mocking the need for the relationship we’re all in, in contrast to… what?

Mocking cliches of piety — maybe this is why Kitt seem to sit so resolutely outside the legacy of “soul” as a singer, and only somewhat overlaps with jazz (I have a rather nice 1991 LP with a stupid title, Eartha Kitt: Thinking Jazz), no more part of its canons than (say) Louis Prima. Anyway, as we can see — to return to particulars from airy and confusing generalities — Kitt’s sensibility was never about the fetish for some idealised cultural home-space blessedly free from roleplay or powerplay or the erotics of hierarchy. Nor (of course) should anyone’s idea of soul or jazz have been, but somehow the UK factions in the post-punk critical generation worked together to effect exactly this: perhaps the single greatest failure of this era was our collective inability to open up a language and an ethos that encompassed the new music in front of us, the post-Elvis tradition, and a grown-up non-symbolic understanding of soul, of jazz-as-ethos… and of everything Eartha seems to carry about her, on this LP above all.

RE/Search were attempting with this particular collection and its 1994 follow-up to re-purpose several lost strands of music, from electronica to what became known as loungecore, and venturing in the process a little clumsily through the usual stages of a re-evaluation: between a forgotten and a rediscovered pleasure lies an awkward stretch of ambiguously evolving attitude, easily tagged (and dismissed) as “ironic” or “guilty”. I don’t think it’s an accident that Kitt fell into this area for them: as a collective RE/Search had travelled from old-skool west coast punk-rock ‘tood (the zine was then called Search and Destroy) via Ballardian Industrial Culture (which was fascinated with celebrity and mediation and muzak and such figures as Martin Denny) to its not-very-clear slightly self-congratulatory 90s identity, which embraced tattoos, scarification, circus freaks, and the “Angry Women” project (which Kitt fairly easily belonged in, truth to tell). The “irony” this kind of project risks having imposed on it is a feeble ghost of the mode that Hitchcock or Kitt are so confidently deft within and so unsettling deploying: you see the generous motive behind a title like “Incredibly Strange Music” (to recast something seemingly over-familiar and uninteresting as utterly weird), and yet it’s fairly tricky not also to be feeling that much of this music is really only “Incredibly Strange” if you start from an “Incredibly Self-regarding and Parochial” viewpoint. Which perhaps RE/Search felt its readers mainly did?

(Actually there’s a lot to be written about 90s attempts to resolve the 80s impasse — but I’ve already written quite a lot, and don’t intend to pursue that issue here.) (Phew! and indeed Hurrah! cry the long-suffering FT readers…)

To follow every hint and glint of this music, we have to be drenched in a world that’s gone: I can laboriously patch in some of the relevant backstory, but the labour drags down away at the intended effect. We’ve forgotten too much, if we ever even knew it. Examine the label credit — to chase up the provenance of the songs, which were at some point very deliberately selected and agreed on, even before René’s arrangements were written, and work on the sense of conceptual unity begun — and you’re instantly embrangled in a tangle of typos, long-dispersed modish approval, forgotten events and musicals and names: George Shearing (‘Lullaby of Birdland’) and Marvin Fisher (‘Just an Old-Fashioned Girl’) were well enough known in some circles, as perhaps are Mack David (co-composer of ‘If I Can’t Take It With Me When I Go’) and Murray Grand (co-composer of ‘Thursday’s Child) — but Jean-Piere (sic) Moulin? Who was Mesi Julian? ‘Oggere’ seems to be by the Afro-Cuban composer Gilberto Valdés (the label credits just say “Valdez”), and the “Tabares” of the ‘No Importa Si Menti’ composer-credit may be Baz Tabranes, but who was “Tore”, the sole fragmentary indication of the identity of the composer-author of ‘Fascinating Man’? And has no one else ever sung this song? Really? (Don’t say Falco — only the title’s the same… )

(None of the above is actual real proper historical research, mind you: I didn’t even hunt through my own books, just set off on a few lightning google-trips across the internet — I wanted to out the post up before the actual end of time — so any clues others turn up or already know are very welcome. Orson Welles called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” and cast her as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr Faustus: she also crossed over into semi-highbrow Broadway appearances, such as a musical based on archie and mehitabel, called Shinebone Alley, one of the first with an all-integrated cast, which I want to know more about. I’ve gone nowhere near her role as the third Catwoman, as nuttily perfect as Sun Ra’s Batman project, or the free shows she gave to East Londoners, one of which I saw in the very early 80s… )

Which all brings us back, the long route, to the ‘prevarication move’, and how it was I had something I could baffle the older kids with in 1975-ish, even knowing none of this. Something happened in the late 50s and early 60s, a cultural ruin of sorts, and whether you blame Elvis or “rock” or Vietnam or perhaps even the Vegas swing culture that was one victim of the ruin, that’s allowed songs like to be artefacts that hide more than they reveal, and escape more they connect; for performances like this to be mysteries more than they’re windows. Gather together nothing more than the languages Kitt sings in on this LP — Spanish, French, German, some kind of apache street pidgin in ‘Mademoiselle Kitt’, whatever Cuban patois is featured in the sinister and magnificent ‘Oggere’ — and the scattered dance styles that René unifies into his own orchestral voice, and you’d faced, in the end, with the masked pain, which is also very much the mastered pain, of a performer who never had a home to go back to her; whose family are the multicultural band of outsiders of the Josephine Baker orphanage; a smart, highly political girl-pirate, a feminist Vegas showgirl, who made the stage her best trusted place.

All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up, as another old-fashioned left banker once wrote.

Its a real privilege to reveal to you that this top ten is entirely female, so much so that I might be inspired, much like Whoopi Goldberg inspired me in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit to make a comeback and win next year. I’ve got a soup tureen full of Grammy’s you know.

10. Nicola Roberts - ‘Lucky Day’

For chrissakes put some trousers on woman:

9. tUnEyArDs - ‘Bizness’

I’m listening to WhoKill as I’m typing up this list, and “Bizness” is definitely the best track on it. Well done, voting public! If you haven’t heard any tUnEyArDs yet then watch the video, it’s a corker.

8. Nicola Roberts - ‘Beat of My Drum’
Along with Gaga and Katy B, Nicola suffered badly from a split vote across many songs, though I’m sure Team Ginge will be consoled by having two songs in the top 10. Video AGAIN features inadvisable fashion choices but at least those are sensibly shaped pants she’s got on:

7. Beyonce - ‘Countdown’

This year I watched Beyonce’s 90-minute Glastonbury set, enthralled, but it was only later that I really appreciated how good it was. Not only can she holler and dance at an unbelievable level, she can do it while she has morning sickness. I am starting to think Beyonce may actually be a new evolved species of superhuman.

6. Robyn - ‘Call Your Girlfriend’

FT Reader Favourite Robyn was in the lead during the early stages of voting, but eventually had to be satisfied with 6th.

5. Nicki Minaj - ‘Super Bass’

If Nicki hadn’t released this song then she probably would have been relegated to Guest Rapper status for the rest of eternity. Thankfully this has been avoided!

4. 2NE1 - ‘I Am the Best’

Tireless efforts by Frank Kogan and the Singles Jukebox crew have finally made Korean pop much more than a curiosity for us ignorant westerners this year. Non-ugly girlgroup 2NE1 have only been going a few years but they are the cream of the K-pop crop and BLIMEY don’t they know it.

3. Nadia Oh - ‘Taking over the Dancefloor (Kate Middleton)’
My personal favourite! If you’ve not heard or seen anything of Nadia’s before, have a look at this. Go on, it’s only 90 seconds long. What’s the worst that could happen?

2. Lana Del Rey - ‘Video Games’

‘Divisive’ might be one word to describe Miss Del Ray this year, but it seems that plenty of you lot are fond of the ol’ Pong (or Playstation, whatever).

1. Azealia Banks - ’212′

Well clear of the field with 199 points to Lana’s 149 and Nadia’s 147 we have sweet little ‘street urchin’ Azealia Banks, who has done alarmingly well considering ’212′ only fully emerged in the last few months of the year. Here she is – make sure the kids are out of the room…

There we go! Thanks again to everyone who voted – see you next year!

I’m sure it won’t Miley. Let’s have a look at entries #20-#11:

20. Rihanna ft Calvin Harris - ‘We Found Love’

RiRi is in the bath with her Docs on. That’s an extreme measure, especially when taking a hammer to them will usually do just fine.

19. Gotye ft. Kimbra - ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’

New to me! Video features a indie schmindie dude in the buff who could be either Gotye or Kimbra but whoever it is they could do with a haircut (I need a haircut myself so I know what I’m talking about).

18. PJ Harvey - ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’

Soldiers falling like lumps of meat! I wonder if Polly paid a visit to erstwhile carnivore sanctuary St John before composing this cheerful ditty. Try the sweetbreads, they’re delicious.

17. Emeli Sandé - ‘Heaven’

Not a DJ Sammy cover alas. Instead there’s more than a whiff of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ about this tune, i.e. it is quite good.

16. Pistol Annies - ‘Hell On Heels’

Miranda Lambert has acquired some chums who are just as drunk as she is, and the results are excellent.

15. Adele - ‘Rolling In The Deep’

Well, it had to be in here somewhere, didn’t it? Here’s the Jamie xx remix which someone nominated instead:

14. Katy B - ‘Broken Record’

Plenty of love for Katy B all over the place including your votes. This track has come out the top of her five (5) nominations in this poll and weirdly enough does NOT feature a dubstep breakdown.

13. Diddy/Dirty Money ft Swizz Beats - ‘Ass on the Floor’

Also known as “WhennyrrinnurclurrbgeyerrASSonnafloor”, this is epic even by Last Train To Paris standards. Despite the title it is not really about The Club at all as Diddy promptly scarpers from the dancefloor in hot pursuit of a Mystery Lady.

12. Labrinth ft. Tinie Tempah - ‘Earthquake’

This partnership was the other way around for most of 2010 but now Tinie has returned the favour. Stick with the video until 2.23 where Labrinth and his Jedi clones do a bit of choral evensong for your listening pleasure.

11. LMFAO ft. Lauren Bennett & Goonrock - ‘Party Rock Anthem’

Sometimes big pop hits are undeniable! Sometimes everybody appears to be shuffling! Sometimes one cannot apologise for party rocking. In any case, earlier this year I turned on 4Music for the first time in about 6 months and this was the first song that I encountered = SIGNIFICANT.

Top 10 tomorrow!

Cheers Kanye. Tracks #30-#21 under the cut!

30. Florence and The Machine – ‘Shake It Out’

Well done FT readers for not picking the r4c1st single! ‘Shake It Out’ sounds like Animal Collective to me which may or may not be your cup of tea, but whatever it sounds like at least you can rely on Flo for some big hand gestures and billowing robes.

29. HyunA - ‘Bubble POP’

The long version: HyunA is a non-ugly Korean lass who has launched her solo career after being in a successful girlband blah blah blah whatevs. The short version: STUPID DUBSTEP BREAKDOWN.

28. Avril Lavigne – ‘What the Hell’

‘Girlfriend’ Part 2 (not really) sees an increasingly glassy-eyed Avril shrieking her way through a series of irresponsible actions, i.e. it is awesome. Fans of anti-ageing creams/magic potions dished out by Isabella Rossilini may wish to note that Avril Lavigne is ‘only’ 27 years old.

27. Metronomy - ‘The Look’

I fell for The English Riviera completely this year, and didn’t help matters by going on holiday to Cornwall. Anyway, this is rather good considering it’s indier than Noddy Holder’s sideboards and the video features pigeons.

26. Patrick Wolf – ‘Together’

In this video Patrick has placed a stuffed fox upon each of his shoulders. Cue a wibbly-wobbly Werther’s Original moment of when I menaced Nicola Roberts with a stuffed fox at the Popjustice £20 Music Prize a few years ago [sniiiiip - Ed]. Where was I? Oh yes, if Robyn was a dude she’d be Patrick Wolf innit. And she would have robins on her shoulders instead of wolves oh wait.

25. Fucked Up - ‘Queen of Hearts’

Brace yourselves – it’s some Indie Rock with people shouting! Fairly sure Lauren Laverne says ‘effed up’ when announcing this on 6Music. File the video under ‘hein’.

24. Metronomy - ‘The Bay’

The big disco number off the album! The small-town seaside psychodrama is still present and correct but here Metronomy are imagining what it’d be like if they ever managed to leave Torquay, e.g. going to see The Rapture at Exeter Students Union.

23. Britney Spears – ‘Till the World Ends’

With Dr Luke, Max Martin and Ke$ha on the credits, Britney hardly needed to turn up, but the end result is somehow more uplifting and life-affirming than most of the Just 17-problem-page stuff we had last year (hello ‘Firework’). Not bad considering it is inherently another Apocalypse Sh4g track.

22. Adele - ‘NEVER MIND I’ll find SOMEONE LIKE YOOOOOOOUUU’

Title written EXACTLY as it was nominated, there. Foghorns ahoy for the biggest selling single of the year in the UK (over a million copies between January and July 2011). It only got to #55 in Japan though – suck on that, Adele!

21. Ms Dynamite - ‘Neva Soft’

It’s so nice to have Naomi back in full effect! This track has a strange old mix of beats but she lassoes it all together perfectly. Here seems a good place to link to the full list of members of So Solid Crew, sadly taken down from Wikipedia.

Coming up later today: into the teens!

Thanks for that Will. Poll results #40-#31 under the cut!

40. Big Freedia - ‘Y’all Get Back Now’

An absolute 100% no-messin’ banger from the New Orleans bounce scene, much beloved by The Singles Jukebox crew (check the comments thread for a cameo appearance by Freedia’s DJ!). I totally underrated it at the time but its infectiousness soon got the better of me.

39. Laurel Halo - ‘Aquifer’

Time for the token techno entry! If you know your techno you’ve probably heard this already, if you don’t then I’d say it’s more on the ambient pitter-patter end of the spectrum rather than the mechanical or vworpy ends (i.e. more Orb than Orbital) (and yes it’s a multi-dimensional spectrum).

38. St Vincent – ‘Surgeon’

I keep reading the song title as ‘Sturgeon’ but I can confirm that St Vincent is not the patron saint of fish nor is this song about fish. Unless there is some hidden subtext I’m missing amongst her woozy burble? We had to dissect a fish in Biology once so perhaps that’s it.

37. Swede Mason - ‘Masterchef Synaesthesia’

Even Masterchef-haters can appreciate the time and effort that’s gone in to making this. Gawd bless the Great British Public – they managed to get it to #37 in the charts.

36. DJ Fresh ft. Sian Evans - ‘Louder’

Last year DJ Fresh did awesome skipping, this year things have gone a bit Rastamouse and the kids are all on skateboards and rollerskates. If one was being cynical one might say that this tune was constructed purely for use in pre-Olympic sporting hype montages.

35. Wiz Khalifa – ‘Black and Yellow’

This one popped its head up above the parapet last December and as such was a bit of a grey area (it made a number of 2010 lists, but only entered the UK chart in March 2011). Anyway it’s great so have another listen.

34. Lady Gaga – ‘Scheiße’

Belgian hoover-rave has never sounded so hormonal! Gaga describes the terrible fate of many women across the globe who get constipated around that time of the month.

33. Pitbull ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, & Nayer – ‘Give Me Everything’

Despite a fairly dodgy premise (Ne-Yo basically sings “hey the apocalypse is about to happen, let’s sh4g”) this song finally wore me down by December. According to Wikipedia, Pitbull’s vocal range spans from G to B♭, with the title melody is a short tonic expansion utilizing the pitches E♭–E♭ major/D–E♭–A♭. I’m a sucker for all that.

32. Lady Gaga – ‘The Edge Of Glory’

Stefanie cracks out the saxophones and studded leather for possibly the worst episode of Sesame Street you’ll ever see. Amazingly this is her highest entry in the list but let’s face it she’s had plenty of ‘em.

31. Rebecca Black – ‘Friday’

R! B! Rebecca! Black! The most controversial song of the year is much lower down the list than I was expecting but perhaps most of you are sick of bowl and cereal by now?

#30-#21 coming up tomorrow (hopefully)!

50. PJ Harvey – ‘The Last Living Rose’

She won an award you know! I am the only person on the internet who doesn’t like PJ Harvey’s voice so I shall just post the video and be done with it. The walls of her house appear to be made out of Stilton.

49. Diddy/Dirty Money ft Skylar Grey – ‘Coming Home’

Probably the most successful of the billion singles released off Last Train To Paris, this is the one where Diddy slags off Smokey Robinson then decides he’s alright really.

48. Wild Flag – ‘Future Crimes’

Indie supergroup ahoy! It’s her out of Sleater-Kinney and her out of Mary Timony. This is one of the few tracks in this top 50 that I hadn’t heard beforehand. It’s not bad, is it?

47. きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ(Kyarypamyupamyu) – ‘PONPONPON’

Your guess is almost certainly better than mine! If you can make it to the end of the video without getting a headache then you win a gold medal.

46. Jessie J ft B.O.B – ‘Price Tag’

Love her or hate her, she’s not going away any time soon. If it’s all a bit much just skip to 1.05 and enjoy the terribleness of LACY JUMPSUIT and LEOPARD TROUSERS in quick succession.

45. Cher Lloyd – ‘With UR Love’

Malvern’s tiniest pop imp sets aside the swagger for a second and gives us a rather sweet teen mid-tempo-er (we need a better word for that).

43. & 44. Nero - ‘Guilt’ & Nero – ‘Promises’

Same points, same number of voters, same vworp-rock with a bit where the synth goes ‘BSSHHHP-BPP-TSZZZ’ and a bit where the lass goes ‘OOOoooOOHHHoHHH’. Nero tested my spreadsheet to its very limits – distinguish between these songs at your peril!

42. Dev ft Cataracs – ‘Bass Down Low’

‘Get your mitts in my oven’ indeed. Anyone would think that the levels of DECENCY and PROPRIETY in our society were no more than antiquated concepts. Nice tattoo though.

41. Alexandra Stan - ‘Mr. Saxobeat’

Here I would like to quote my darling other half’s opinion of ‘Mr Saxobeat’: “On hearing the first few seconds of this song I wanted to stick forks into my eyeballs.” Possibly a little harsh but no more harsh than me referring to PJ Harvey as ‘the pop equivalent of a mad cat lady’. Anyway, if you liked Moldova’s Eurovision entry from 2010 you’ll like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS76eS34Y0c

Coming up soon: #40-#31!

As per last year, here is a big list of lower reaches stuff (tracks that got more than one vote) to get you started – #50-#41 coming up later today!

97. Mary Mary - Walking
96. Lykke Li - Sadness is a Blessing
95. The Joy Formidable - Whirring
94. Nero - Crush On You
93. Rihanna - S&M
92. Katy Perry - Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)
91. Lady Gaga - Judas
90. Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne & Andre 3000 - Dedication to My Ex (Miss That)
89. Example - Changed the Way You Kiss Me
88. Maroon 5 ft Christina Aguilera - Moves Like Jagger
87. Gang Gang Dance - Mindkilla
86. Nicole Scherzinger - Right There
85. Kasabian - Velociraptor!
84. Mazzy Star - Common Burn
83. Olly Murs feat. Rizzle Kicks - Heart Skips A Beat
82. Rizzle Kicks - Down With The Trumpets
81. Frank Ocean - Novacane
80. Coldplay - Paradise
79. Katy B - Witches Brew
78. Mann ft 50 Cent - Buzzin
77. Eric Saade - Popular
76. JoJo - Marvins Room (Can’t Do Better)
75. John Maus - Believer
74. Nicola Roberts - Take a Bite
73. Martin Solveig & Dragonette - Hello
72. Toddla T - Take It Back
71. Björk - Crystalline
70. Little Dragon - Ritual Union
69. Tom Waits - Last Leaf
68. Todd Terje - Snooze 4 Love
67. Kreayshawn - Gucci Gucci
66. Lady Gaga - You And I
65. Miguel - Sure Thing
64. Cold Cave - Confetti
63. Bobby Brackins feat. Dev - A1
62. Lady Gaga - Born This Way
61. Joe Goddard featuring Valentina - Gabriel
60. Metronomy - Everything Goes My Way
59. Britney Spears - Hold It Against Me
58. Tom Waits - New Year’s Eve
57. Wild Flag - Romance
56. Kelly Rowland feat. Lil Wayne - Motivation
55. Patrick Wolf - The City
54. Katy B - Easy Please Me
53. GD&TOP - High High
52. Chase & Status - Blind Faith
51. Diddy/Dirty Money - Sade

(If anyone wants to make a Spotify playlist out of these they’re more than welcome!)

I think everyone hears a record in their youth which suddenly reveals a whole new world of possibilities. It could be a three minute punk song, where simplicity and lyrical fervour suddenly make the business of writing your own songs seem possible. Maybe hearing the Aphex Twin opened a world of atonal computer music, bedroom techno that saw no instuments at all. Or think of the kid coming home from yet another tedious trumpet lesson hearing the joyous release of Two Tone and looking in a whole new way at his instrument.

For me it was the Theme To S-Express. I knew drum machines existed, I knew sampling was going on. But hearing the cut and paste of S-Express suddenly suggested that my tape recorder was not just a way of listening to music, it was also a way of making music. I crudely stitched together my own extended version, interpolating bits of Pump Up The Volume, and latterly made a frankly tedious twenty two minute version of Beat Dis which barely held its own beat for twenty seconds. The beat franlly was the annoying bit, if I could get that to match up it sounded fine, but I couldn’t add my own samples over that beat, it would cut out when I tried to add a speech from Ripping Yarns.

But I had seen the future of pop and was insanely excited about this new sound. Then as soon as it happened, this sampladelic revolution got subsumed into Acid House, dance music and the wit and joy of finding vocal samples seemed to vanish into single hooks. The Jigsaw of S-Express had its moment in the sun then vanished. The KLF were doing some things like it off of my radar, but even when they got big, they were inventing their own lunacy.

And then, five years later, when I wasn’t looking for it I heard Little Fluffy Clouds. A song which has a laconic bubbling up beat under the longest strongest intro sample I had heard in ages. And that is before we get on to the frankly astounding Rickie Lee Jones sample.

“They went on for ever and they when I we lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds and .. they were long and clear and there were lots of stars, at night. And when it rained it would all turn, it, they were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere, that’s, its neat because I used to look at them all the time when I was little. You don’t see that.”

The secret of a good sample is for it to be compelling, fit the song and withstand constant repetition. This one does more than that, for all of its stoner simplicity, its seeming near idiocy, the American pastoral nature contrasts nicely with the previous very English sample. The beat isn’t anything special, the tune is pretty unremarkable, but the playful cut and pasting of the sample yet again shows endless possibilities if you find some interesting content. Compared to much of its parent album (the fantastic Adventure Beyond The Ultraworld) Little Fluffy Clouds is positively stuffed with content. But even by itself it seems laconic, laid back – the very essence of ambient house. I loved it and still do.

And the song is about its own method, Layering different sounds…

Rickie Lee Jones, her of the sample, didn’t love it. Annoyed that the track made her sound, well, stupid and or stoned she sued. And since she makes up the lions share of the song, Bog Life settled out of court. I do feel a little sorry that Rickie Lee Jones’s extensive musical career may have a highpoint represented by sounding a bit. On the other hand, perhaps she should be proud that The Orb found this obscure sample and made it into this track. After all, not many of us could give such a good response to the question.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”
“Mainly grey.”

Every now and then another jigsaw ambient track pops up to impress me. Nothing will ever blow the doors down like The Theme To S-Express, or perfect the form such as Little Fluffy Clouds. And I still believe I could make that brilliant bit of bricolage. And then to get myself in the mood, I listen to the Orb again. Which stops me, I could never beat it. The Theme From S-Express opened that door, Little Fluffy Clouds perhaps closed it. The problem with near perfect art is that it sometimes stops any form of imitation.

“You might still see it in the desert.”

Send your top 20 tracks of 2011 to poptimistspoll2010@gmail.com* by 1am GMT on 30th December and we will post the results during the first week of January.

- ‘Tracks of 2011′ can mean something released as a single or on an album this year, or a track that emerged this year on the internet or a young person’s trendy mixtape, or singles taken from a 2010 album released this year. To be honest I will be pretty lenient about the whole business so put whatever you like.

- The order of your top 20 is important! Your #1 will be allocated more points than #20.

- If you can’t think of 20 songs then 10 or 14 or 2 is just fine.

- As per last year we are running this poll in conjunction with the Poptimists LJ community, so if you’ve already sent me your 2011 list over there, there’s no need to do so again.

That’s it! Get voting!

*Yes yes I know it’s last year’s email address. A big ‘whatevs’ to you too :)

Fortunately it turned out to be an excellent breakfast, so if you’re feeling the worse for the season tomorrow and the mere idea of what follows doesn’t make you boak perhaps it is a thing you would like to put in your mouth.

STEP ONE:
This was actually well pre-sandwich, when I decided that studding two clementines with cloves and dusting them with all spice, then heating them in the oven, might make the house smell quite nice. This does work but then set me thinking that the inside of the oven was now infused with a fog of lovely smells

Also pictured: seasonal pyjamas

STEP TWO:
Find some bacon. In my case this was an easy case of opening the fridge and having one of a stupid quantity of packets fall on my face.

As the goal was to cook said bacon in the oven and all my baking trees were covered in biscuits, I made a little tray out of silver foil; the benefits of this method are not having to wash anything up. I put the bacon on the impromptu tray, added black pepper and some dribbled black treacle:

And then I awarded myself a second Michelin star

STEP THREE:
Bacon in the oven, leave it there for the length of time it takes your other half to finish wrapping your presents. I cooked it in the ‘grill’ position, at about 160 degrees so that it would get infused with as much of the rising clove and citrus smells as possible. Did this work? Who knows, it smelt good.

Meanwhile, I got some bread and did the bit of this that I suspect might leave a lot of people’s blood running cold:

-Get two slices of wholemeal bread (nb: must be wholemeal, white is too sweet for this) for each sandwich eater
-Spread cranberry sauce on one slice
-Spread brandy butter on the other
-Add sliced tomatoes on top of the cranberry sauce- if I’d been thinking I would’ve baked these a bit in the tray that had the clementines in but sadly my brain wasn’t working that fast

Shut up this is going to be delicious

STEP FOUR:
When bacon is done to your satisfaction (I left it in until it was curling and crisp) then get it out, slap it on the tomato-ey slice and cover with the brandy butter slice. Cut in rough halves and garnish with your choice of Christmas flotsam:

Of course one should always at least part-peel chocolate coins before serving

A long-suffering victim of my culinary exploits can testify that these were fucking delicious.

(You could use any meat of course, depending on what you’ve managed to totally overorder)

Again the mother of the household is frying latkes in the first scene (we’re 3 for 4 here), again there is an interfaith family (4 for 4), again there is a stilted explanatory “What is the story of Hanukkah?” scene (3 for 4) and holy crap is that Ray Charles? Holy fuck what is Ray Charles doing in this! Oh man! This is already the best Hanukkah ever!

Nasally Jewish Fran and her Anglican English beau Maxwell are MARRIED and PREGNANT and gosh I stopped watching The Nanny much too early when I was younger, obviously, because these developments are all news to me. Max, his daughter and his business partner C.C. are going to a musical preview in Boston to see whether he wants to invest in it or whether his lifetime rival A****w L***d W****r will scoop it.

But oh, no! It’s the first night of Hanukkah! How can you leave Fran alone on the first night of Hanukkah, Max? Sitting at home in an all-leopard-print ensemble (alice band, teakettle and all), Fran kvetches to her mother and her BFF about this gross violation of the family holiday. And while, again, Hanukkah is not such a major festival in the religious sense, the family tradition aspect of home-based holidays is not an unimportant one, and when Fran explains to a helpful passerby nun:

“I’m really upset because my husband isn’t here for the first night of Hanukkah. It’s really important to me, just like Christmas is really important to him. You see, I married one of yours.”

And to be honest, that’s fair enough. Family holidays are important because they’re family holidays, not because of where they fall on the religiousportance scale.

To underline how important the first night of Hanukkah is to Fran’s family, there is a flashback to the 1960s:

This is what everyone in the 1960s looked like and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Max’s extremely likeable British sister shows up in a fetching cream turtleneck jumper to monotone about her recent breakup and then enthuse over booze: “I’m sorry for making such a scene,” she says, showing no emotion whatsoever, before heading into the kitchen and gleefully shouting, “WOO-HOO! New scotch!” SO SAY WE ALL.

On the way to Boston Max crashes the car, driving offroad into snowy, desolate New England woods. He bravely keeps the heating on, explaining to his passengers that there is enough gas left in the car for one hour before they all succumb to hypothermia and die. But lo! In the greatest DO YOU SEE yet, even though the highway patrol doesn’t find them until early morning, the one hour’s worth of gas has managed to last for a full eight hours!

And once everyone is home safe and the scotch is out, Ray Charles plays “There’s no place like home for the holidays” and all join in the applause, actors and studio audience alike.

It’s cheesy, it’s stagey and yet again TV Jews Don’t Marry TV Jews, but there is at least a jolly, perfunctory reworking of the Hanukkah myth, some fairly thoughtful discussion around why family holiday traditions are important for their own sake, an accurate portrayal of the crucial role of sufficient good alcohol at times such as these, and RAY CHARLES.

RATING: 8/8 miracle candles

Downstairs, Mama LaBeouf is frying too-perfect latkes while the rest of the family hovers hungrily (but not actually helpfully). “You know what Mom, you haven’t told us the Hanukkah story since we were little kids,” a brunette teenager prompts.

“Well,” she begins. “Your ancestors – from my side of the family,” and it’s INTERFAITHSPOSITION AWAY as we find this is yet another Hanukkah being celebrated by a mixed family. I have nothing against interfaith familes – indeed, I’m part of one – but SERIOUSLY do no Jews marry Jews in TV land? Or is it that the kind of shows that do Hanukkah specials are the kind that need audience stand-ins (aka cultural Christians) more than usual?

Shows featuring a lot of Jewish characters like your Seinfelds and your Curb Your Enthusiasms don’t tend to give Hanukkah a lot of play, by which I mean I couldn’t find any episodes featuring it for this series; this may be because one of the main functions of Hanukkah is a pushback against non-Jewish cultural hegemony. The Maccabee Revolt it celebrates has been broadly interpreted as an act of resisting assimilation into majority Greek culture, and because the historical date of the event (25 Kislev) falls in ‘the Christmas season’ of majority-Christian cultures it has evolved into an affirmation of non-Christian identity during that time. IE the Jewier the culture, the less major a holiday it is (and it is, for the record, a really minor holiday religiously speaking) and the less need to shout about it, hence Jerry Seinfeld not really caring that much about it.

Interestingly, in “Heck of a Hanukkah” the dad has a line implying the family doesn’t celebrate Christmas unless his relatives are there, possibly signifying that the Stevens parents are aiming to keep their home as ‘Jewish’ a space as possible under the circumstances (ie dominant Christian culture).

The plot is a little “It’s A Wonderful Life” action, led by the spirit of Bubbe Rose, Tiny Beef’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. Tiny Beef has been replaced by a straight-A terror of a child, while his brother(?) and sister(?) are hilarious inversions of their normal selves (I’m guessing).

This is probably screamingly funny if you watch the show regularly. Or…not.

Straight-A Terror rules the household with an iron fist, but Tiny Beef encourages his siblings to go on strike from household chores and teaches them to laugh by flinging raw chicken around the kitchen and leading a conga line. In the end Bubbe Rose sorts everything out and even fixes the Hanukkah presents Tiny Beef RUINED in the first scene of the episode, proving that family is all very well and good but family don’t put rollerblades on the table, which is the important thing.

WHERE MY ROLLERBLADES AT

There is an extremely endearing scene of the Stevenses gathered around a dreidl, cheering it on and shouting “Gimel! Gimel!” and “Nun, nun, nun!” Spoiler alert: no one has ever been that excited about dreidl. It is not a very well-designed game and it goes on 40% too long after all the fun has been desperately wrung out of it. However, it is exactly the same too-earnest, over-the-top way American TV characters celebrate other holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that’s something, I guess.

RATING: 4/8 miracle candles

NB I have never seen an episode of The OC before and watched this while (a) drunk and (b) packing. So I may have missed some subtleties, but actually looking back I don’t think so.

Christmukkah is a metaphor for a love triangle, or possibly the love triangle is a metaphor for Christmukkah. Also we’re running 2 for 2 on interfaith families in Hanukkah episodes, possibly because Christmas is too darn exciting for even American TV shows to give up completely. Indeed, “Christmukkah is about not choosing!” Seth Cohen cheerfully announces while brandishing his menorah. I should point out that it took me until halfway through the episode to realise he and Troubled Blond Cheekbones were not boyfriends.

It is also possible I’m drunk right now. HAPPY DECEMBER TIME!

Meanwhile, a blonde lady lawyers up, it turns out Mischa Barton is not actually very good at acting and there is a woman who is inexplicably not Joan Holloway.

At a glitzy upper-middle-class party Seth Cohen tries to fulfill his desire to have both Christmas Anna and Hanukkah Summer but ends up with no one and nothing. Not even Troubled Blond Cheekbones, who has gone off with Mischa Barton in a drunk driving shoplifting van.

If you were sober enough to try to pass the breathalyzer then why didn’t you drive the car in the first oh never mind.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you try to have it both ways you will end up with empty hands and an empty heart, in romance as in seasonal religious observance. A cold message indeed!

However, after careful analysis I can exclusively reveal that the true meaning of Christmukkah is: if it’s 2003 and you’re a middle-class white guy in your teens/20s and you have a compulsive need to tell every woman you’re attracted to how amazing the Shins are, shut up.

Yes, you. Especially you.

RATING: 5/8 miracle candles

Nickelodeon classic cartoon Rugrats features an interfaith Jewish-Christian family and more holiday specials than you can shake a baby at. The episode titled “Chanukah” features adventure, drama, triumph, grown-up Hebrew jokes and two bad puns around “Maccabee”:

The other one, for the record, is “To be or Maccabee”.

It also stands out among the other specials (probably) for having a relative lack of pointed counterculturalism. In the paradigm of the eponymous rugrats, Ashkenazi Jewish culture is normative. Unlike nearly all the other specials yet to come (ho ho ho) it is not overtly pushing back against the cultural Christian hegemony. Part of this is because Jews in the US control the media much more than we do in the UK (ho ho ho) and therefore in America secular cultural Christianity, if not earnest religious Christianity, is slightly less pervasive than it is in the UK. DOCTOR WHO I AM LOOKING AT YOU.

Noted antisemite The Doctor and his Aryan friends drive their panzer shark through the Christmas Reich

Yet even in a happy, well-adjusted mixed-faith family, subtle pressure to assimilate arises from Angelica Pickles, the domineering blonde toddler, who encourages the Jewish babies (her cousin Tommy Pickles and friend Chuckie Finster) to spurn their roots and buckle to the Christian cultural majority. Angelica’s first appearance in this episode comes as the children act out the story of Antiochus and Judah Maccabee, where she is an enthusiastic first adopter of enforced pagan worship. Angelica spends the rest of the story trying to gain access to a TV to watch a glitzy Christmas special (DO YOU SEE) while casually tromping on everything the kinderlach hold dear.

“What kind of bobohead makes pancakes out of potatoes?” she demands, spitting out her first (and only) bite of latke, before tripping up a giant man-dreidl who drops doughnuts all over the floor of the Beth Shalom Cultural Centre. Angelica: 3, Judaism: 0.

Fleeing the scene of her toddler hate crime, she stumbles up the aron ha-kodesh. She mistakes it for an entertainment centre (IT IS, ANGELICA, AN ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE OF THE SOUL) before running in horror from a kindly old rebbe who attempts to explain the history and meaning of Torah to her.

Would you like a blood libel with that?

Yet it is her position as a tool of the broader cultural hegemony that allows Angelica to save the day through her knowledge of genre norms. As the babies try to defeat the Meanie of Hanukkah, it is Angelica who realises how to neutralise adults, at least in all animated series aimed at children (spoiler: it involves comic snoring in front of a TV set). Having achieved this coup, she retires into the background with the rest of her mixed-faith family and allows klezmer, kippot and comic old men named Shlomo to take centre stage. Just like Antiochus did.

Full marks also given for the extremely accurate portrayal of the age-65+ “Women of Zion Senior Choir” every Jewish cultural centre is required to have in order to stay funded, as well as the inclusion of a steam-powered piston menorah that produces klezmer music and toy dancing shtetl-dwellers.

And although the episode implied the story of Jonah is in the Torah when any fule kno that it is in the Tanakh, this literacy gap is made up for by a joke in Hebrew about a mohel offering “cut rates”. A++++ cock joke in a kid’s cartoon, Nickelodeon. Well done you.

RATING: 7/8 miracle candles.

(Note link also includes MATHEMATICAL FORMULA FOR POP SUCCESS, and other reliable christmas cracker filling material…)

The Brittas Empire blessed us with not one but TWO Christmas specials. The first (1994) took advantage of the break in format to do some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey nostalgia and show what they are all doing MANY YEARS in the future while also remembering their PAST.

Carole is now a concert pianist, Tim’s boyfriend (er… Derek?) is running for parliament and Gordon Brittas is a UN Peace Envoy. Of course! However most of the episode is a baffling yet harrowing tale of starvation, survival and costume drama dress-up:

Youtube for Brittas Wobs #1

The second 1996 special has a similar survival-against-the-odds theme. The gang go on a team-building course in rural Wales, where Brittas’ wife Helen goes on a murderous rampage! I am quite pleased that Helen seems to have exactly the same wardrobe, haircut and facial expression that I have currently:

"Noes hair straighteners won't be invented for another 8 years D: "

Youtube for Brittas Wobs #2