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

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.

“There was a little girl. The policewoman went into the scary room and she saw the shark, it went round and round. There was a man and a dog and they turned into a lion.They ran and they saw an ice cream van. The eye was talking. Doctor who climbed up the ladder. Doctor Who saved everyone from the monster. The big eye comes into the town. The big eye made a fuss and Doctor Who sorted it all out.”

Verdict: “A good Doctor Who”.

(I would agree.)

Joe McElderry: He’ll be Number 1 next week most likely, but while the ‘battle’ was never about him this puts him firmly in the “Leon Jackson” box, not the “Will Young” one. On the other hand, the constant refrain from the judges during the series was that he had a musical theatre kind of a voice, and this might nudge him in that direction and away from the fickle world of pop. Before dabbing your eyes over Joe’s lost dreams, it’s worth noting that if he’d sold as many as Alexandra did with “Hallelujah” last year, he’d have been #1, Rage or no Rage.

Rage Against The Machine: It’s good profile-raising stuff for them and their other material will do well from it, though unless MP3s come with reading lists in their IP3 tags the ‘educational’ element of RATM may be a little missing. The downsizing of their song’s target from “institutional racism” to “Simon Cowell” is probably a fairer reflection of their listeners’ concerns anyway but it’s left them looking a little… cuddlier… than once they did (and their participation in a classic British radio brouhaha has only helped). They themselves have joined in with gusto, of course: “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE THANKS ‘EVERY FAN AND FREEDOM FIGHTER’ FOR THE ‘ANARCHY CHRISTMAS MIRACLE OF 2009′” blared their press release.

Simon Cowell: Cowell has not come out of this terribly well (though obviously not materially poorer): he handled it remarkably badly, turning just another web campaign into an actual issue by taking public note of it. In the last few days he’s come on-message, talking about the excitement of the competition, etc etc. But it’s his early churlishness that’s the lingering – and rather delicious – memory. The outcome will hardly dent his personal power, of course, and his public image thrives on dislike – but the effectiveness of the campaign might mean his “first among equals” prominence on his own properties needs to be dialled back.

The X Factor: With 18 million viewers – 17.5 million more than the maximum number of RATM buyers this week – the X Factor isn’t going anywhere, and it’s wishful thinking to imagine this damages ITV’s biggest light entertainment show since Morecambe And Wise. The Dubai-esque follies reportedly planned – “World X-Factor”, 5 judges, a ‘novelties’ category – will do for the programme in the end, but that won’t have anything to do with Rage. As I’ve argued before, what this result exposes is the problem of the winner’s single being so vestigial to the rest of the show: the storyline is over, the narrative complete, the single is just a “happy ever after” and who cares about the details of that? The X Factor’s mistake was to get to the position where its winner NOT getting a No.1 was a much more interesting story than getting one.

The Christmas No.1: as a lot of people have pointed out, the Christmas No.1 isn’t generally much good anyway. I’m still not convinced this idea that there’s a “tradition” of battles at Christmas for the #1 slot has any very deep roots, but we had a battle this year and a lot of fun it was. The big loser here may be the BBC, as the knock-on-effect of this is that its attempt to keep the corpse of TOTP alive for a once a year family shindig is now going to require some tricky politicking.

Real Music: here we get into more contentious areas. The “RATM is a win for real music” argument – and it’s being made by Rage themselves so we should take it seriously – comes in many different forms. At its mildest, it’s just opposition to a light ent show getting droit de seigneur over the charts at Christmas, and saying that a loss for the X-Factor makes pop more exciting. This is true, though a lot of people who normally don’t give a monkeys about pop or the charts suddenly coming over all Paul-Morley-In-1982 about them might raise the odd eyebrow.

Beyond that, though, the idea that Rage beating Joe is good for real music rests on two exaggerations: an exaggeration of the hegemony of the X-Factor, and more seriously an exaggeration of its typicality. The X-Factor gets one or two number one hits per year, and is hit-or-miss in launching its stars careers: it is powerful but it cares mostly about itself, not the wider world of pop. And the music that gets to number one off the back of the X-Factor is almost as distanced from the rest of the chart as RATM’s is (very few of the pop fans I know had kind words to say about “The Climb”).

Two things I’ve seen held up as self-evident truths on why the X-Factor has stifled the industry: it means the charts are full of crap ballads, and it stops record labels investing in artists. The only problem is that the charts aren’t full of ballads – charity singles aside there hasn’t been a #1 ballad this year! And given that two of the #1s there have been were by Dizzee Rascal, a critic’s darling since 2002 who was given an awful lot of time to deliver financially by a big label, it looks like “not investing in artists” isn’t the problem either.

In other words, the idea that the X-Factor music sucks isn’t interchangeable with the idea that pop sucks. The only element of “real music” that l’affaire RATM helps is the ancient rock v pop, or alternative v pop binary. Will the win have any longer-term effects? Well, the closest parallel to this isn’t the Sex Pistols and “God Save The Queen”, it’s metal monsters Lordi winning Eurovision in 2005: a similar irruption of ROCK into a staid citadel of pop, pushed on by bottom-up public opinion. The consequences of the Lordi win were a rash of rock-esque Eurovision entries, and then business as usual. I expect much the same here.

The Charts: A spike in public interest and sales of close on a million look like a big win for the charts. But this would be an optimistic reading. The purpose of the charts – its mission statement, if you like – is to reflect which current music is most popular among British listeners. The reasons for said popularity may not be pure, but there’s a difference between the charts being swayed by something interesting happening somewhere else (like a TV show or a World Cup) and the charts as a playground of gesture. On the other hand, they’ve proved surprisingly robust so far so I almost certainly shouldn’t worry.

Social Media: You’ll hear this one a lot – the RATM win was a triumph for social media! And it was, though ironically the X-Factor is one of the most social media driven TV shows around – facebook fan groups, message boards and Twitter backchannels are vital in keeping a conversation around the show going, and the production team pay them close attention. The moment at which I realised the RATM campaign might actually work was when I read an ILX poster pointing out that most of the people on his Twitter feed saying “Go Rage!” were the same ones who’d been hashtagging and watching the show all season.

So this wasn’t really “old media” vs “new media”. RATM’s success is a victory for a particular style of social media – the quick-hit campaign, the flashmob, an impromptu community beating (or subverting) an established one, “doing it for the Lulz”. The people behind the campaign, as the BBC noted, had tried this before, with the rather less “real music”-ish aim of getting Rick Astley to #1. There’s a “social media for its own sake” feel to flashmobs and the same is to some extent true of this.

Sony: well, duh, good day at the office for them. And it’s also worth thumbing-up the organisers for linking their campaign to the Shelter charity as soon as it got momentum – 70 grand raised for the homeless at Christmas is the one unarguably positive outcome of all this.

The Great British Public: The hangover may be lengthy and tedious and culminate in a Richard Curtis film about the organisers. But for now real winners here are us: while there’s lots of interesting things to say about the RATM incident the overriding thing about it is that it’s funny. How could it not be? Cowell and Rage are (in public at least) both caricatures: when two such collide the results are often comical.

The basic gag is fine – though it got swamped by rhetoric soon enough – but the joy this week has been in the incidental details. Joe throwing darts at a picture of Zach De La Rocha. Rage calling their single’s buyers “freedom fighters”. Mail commenters praising RATM for being anti-EU. The BBC telling a band not to sing “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” and being surprised at what happens. The one word which sums the whole thing up is “pantomime” – everyone playing their big, campy part to entertain us all. And why not? It’s the season for it after all.

He is the star of Samarost, a wonderfully atmospheric point and click adventure, in which our wee willie winkiesque hero has to save his meteorite from an encrouching organic spaceship. He does this in a really attractive set of environments, embedded with humour and a sly twisted logic (as all point and clickers should have). When you finish it (there are about six puzzles to get through) you can move on to Samarost 2 which is much larger, and you may want to buy the second half of (about £3). But just enjoy Samarost first.

SAMAROST

Instead look at The Scarecrow And Mrs King. That is an intriguing title from the get go. Why would Mrs King (ordinary name) be hanging out with someone/thing called The Scarecrow? And are you willing to give the show ten minutes of your time to find out? Maybe Little And Large, Cannon and Ball or even Smith and Jones were not your cup of tea, but the names describe aspects of their acts. (Smith and Jones really were that dull.)

In the understanding that nothing is done randomly in TV, or indeed any artform, here are another 18 double acts with unremarkable names. And a few theories behind the naming.

DEMPSEY AND MAKEPEACE: Dempsey seems like an American name to me, so it flags up the sit in this case being HE’S AN AMERICAN COP, she is a posh British cop. I am not sure you get the posh British bit from “Makepeace”, unless you are willing to go down the Thackery line, but Dempsey certainly tried to be as American as possible on every occasion.

CAGNEY AND LACEY: They are lady cops. That was enough to be a cop-show sit in the 80′s. But the names can be decoded a bit more. Cagney was the tough one, the ball breaker, the one with a cop dad and Cagney has James Cagney lineage. Lacey, well that is like lace, all frilly and girly. I wouldn’t say Tyne Daly was girly, but she played the wife with kids, the more traditionally female role. Which was a bit ironic because she played the female cop role in the not quite feminist Dirty Harry film The Enforcer.

DALZIEL AND PASCOE: Terminally tedious Northern cop show, with the dull premise of one being a bit posh (he went to UNIVERSITY), and one being – er – Northern. This does seem to be a common theme for British cop shows. Anyone would think we were obsessed by class in the UK.

ROSE AND MALONEY: In some ways a British version of Hardcastle & McCormick, Rose (Sarah Lancashire) and Maloney (Phil Davis) were investigators looking into miscarriages of jutice. In a many other ways, wholly unlike Hardcastle & McCormick, as there was no sports car, and Rose was a woman. Called Rose. So Rose is her first name, but Maloney is his surname. Hooray for little league sexism.

TANGO AND CASH: You may complain about this, but whilst both Tango and Cash are unusual surnames, there certainly isn’t anything more interesting about them being stuck together than considered individually. The sit here being merely that Tango and Cash are two hard bitten cops played by action heroes Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell. There is a slight wrinkle in Stallone being the more accountant of the two, but frankly not enough to make you interested bar the explosions. They hate each other, make up and take on the system. You know the deal.

BRONSKI UND BERNSTEIN: Whilst not speaking German I can tell that neither Bronski or Bernstein are interesting together. They are cops by the way. So Bronski on the Beat would have been better. Its a German cop show, where I believe one of them is impulsive, impetuous and the other, er, isn’t. Like ever buddy cop show ever.

STARSKY AND HUTCH: Like this buddy show. Black hair vs blonde. Cardigan versus shirt. You get the deal with Starsky and Hutch – though note that Hutch is a nickname.

TURNER AND HOOCH: This could be borderline because Hooch is a dog. But would you know that from the name? No, Hooch is not an obvious dogs name, (unless you are thinking of Two Dogs the other alcoholic lemonade). But K9 had taken the fun name for a dog buddy movie and Tom Hanks hadn’t gone all serious yet so, they saddled it with this much duller name.

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN: Comic, cartoon or band – in the end its a boy called Sebastian and a giant dog called Belle. Boy and Giant Dog seems snappier to me.

PLUNKETT AND MCCLAINE: Post trainspotting gung-ho stab at making a highwayman tale sexy. Forget that a sexy name might help, rather than the really rather pedestrain Plunkett, and his mate McClaine. Not to be confused with Blunkett and McClaine, crime ffighting duo of David Blunkett (and his dog) and Shirley “Past Lives” McClaine.

THELMA AND LOUISE: First names make this almost stand out as something odd. But two first female names tell you nothiong about the story or why you should be interested (unlike Rita, Sue and Bob Too – which hints at something much more interesting). I’m not saying call it “Watch two Girls Drive Into The Grand Canyon” but…

BRIAN AND MICHAEL: On the same principle as above really. Clearly musicians names are not a reason to listen to them (even when they have awesome band names). But duets, or pairs, usually just go with the full names. So Elton John and Kiki Dee, or Philip Bailey and Phil Collins. Admittedly neither Brian nor Michael has marquee names, but a band name like this wasn’t going to help. Especially when it was discovered that Brian’s real name was Kevin.

BLAKE AND MORTIMER: All I really know about Blake and Mortimer is they are two comics characters drawn in a similar way to Tintin, and appear to be all over France and Belgium. It is quite possible, like Thompson and Thompson, that the names Blake and Mortimer seem archtypically British to the Gauls. But neither name nor combination has me any the wiser.

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO: There is enough give in the name of this double act for it to fit almost seemlessly next to the parade of Universal monsters they ended up meeting. Frankenstein being the best by far.

LAUREL AND HARDY: Again, nothing to decode here, however their films rarely had their names in the title so they were not sold as like this. But when I was a kid and The Laurel & Hardy Show was on, whichw as a terrible animated version of the pair, then the names was all that was needed. It put me off Flying Dueces for twenty years.

CHARLIE AND LOLA: Can’t leavethe kids out. More first names, designed one assumes for their ordinariness, so the very dullness of their name makes the point. And the books they were spawned from had much, much better names (such as “I Will Not Ever Never Eat A Tomato”) The TV series is a bit of a swizz on this then.

ARMSTRONG AND MILLER: Not for them the amusing qualifiers that Mitchell and Webb play with, the dull named Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller are happy to just user the standard Armstrong and Miller Show style name. It does tell you who is in it, so in that respect works perfectly. If you know who they are, and that they were even a double act (which they weren’t for a while).

MORCAMBE AND WISE: They didn’t even need the word Show appended.

I have a fantasy – surely shared by others – of seeing an entire movie based on the aftermath of this scene. First the stillness of the street and the exclamations of bystanders. Someone’s writing down the license plate number. A peach rolls a few feet and stops. In a room where light cuts through wooden shutters, we see photographs arranged on a mantle, and an old black telephone. It rings. A woman answers. The news isn’t good.

OK, maybe it shouldn’t be feature-length. But I luxuriate in these sorts of details when they appear in movies and on TV, and they’re a big reason why I like Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad isn’t some totally new kind of show; it borrows the anxious rubbing together of organized crime and middle-class suburban family life from the Sopranos. But our hero isn’t an illustrious boss with hired muscle and a license to do whatever the fuck. Tony Soprano isn’t bound by the rules that apply to you and me. Neither is Jimmy McNulty. Nor Stringer Bell. Nor anybody on Lost, or Heroes. Nor Buffy. Nor anyone in the lawless town of Deadwood. Nor the doctors on ER, who are deputized to cut you open with a saw if they think that’s the way things are heading.

There’s a good reason why the protagonists in so many dramas (including all of Shakespeare’s) belong to a special caste. If you’re above the law, you can confront high stakes dilemmas without the tedious impingement of finances or a buzz-harshing call to 911. Sure, movie screens teem with ordinary people tapped to save the day. But almost always, they’ve been granted some sovereign dispensation to make it happen. Frodo’s just a hobbit – but he’s got the Ring of Power. Neo’s just a computer addict living in an untidy apartment – but hey presto! He’s The One.

In Breaking Bad we get Walter White. Like all main characters, he sees a big difficulty looming and realizes that all else must be hurdled in order to confront it. But Walt’s an underachieving high school chemistry teacher with shitty health insurance (which is part of his problem). So he takes one big, hare-brained step outside the rules, and his world – public and private – collapses on him like sliding debris. The show works backward from this one decision to dramatize every mental and material consequence that a more privileged protagonist would barely notice, much less have to actually deal with. It’s brilliant.

i wasn’t really watching closely enough to make this an actual real REW, but tonight’s ep of robin h. featured LOLLARDRY! (or at least wycliffism)

UPDATE: didn’t think properly about this last night — robin is set in the reign of king richard (and john?), c.200 years before wycliffe’s translation of the bible into english: the plot point was that such translation was HERESY, which it was in john’s reign: in 1199 pope innocent iiI forbade unauthorised versions in the wake of the cathar and waldensian movements (which lollardry is loosely linked with); prior to this translation hadn’t been considered problematic — the venerable bede made a partial translation, and there’s also the wessex gospels, from c.990

There’s not a lot I could say about them that hasn’t been said before, particularly in terms of gender politics and yet sometimes, whilst I’m lying prone on my parents’ settee wondering why this time of the morning has to exist and watching 4Music, I’m gripped by an urge to rage and by about 11pm this rage occasionally takes on textual shape and form.

The particular music video cliche or staple or whatever bothering me currently is female violence. I was watching the devilishly attractive video to Taking Back My Love’ by Lovely Enrique and the equally Lovely Ciara and was surprised by how actually physically violent he gets there. Not because I was all ‘noez omgz this is glamourising domestic violence’ because Enrique looks like far too much of a wet cloth for that but because I was surprised there was actually a man trashing shit in a video for once. Not that Ciara doesn’t trash equal or greater quantities but we’ll get back to that later.

Let’s get conspiracy-theory based about this for a second: what if there was this huge, international industry known as “music” and this was largely male-dominated in its upper echelons? What if there was a wave of female artists, often particularly fiercely determined owing to the male-dominated nature of the industry, who gradually evolved a sort of ‘angry girl’ collective persona which subsequently began to personify “strong female” as far as sappy idiots commentating on the industry were concerned? What if these sappy idiots, in collaboration with the upper echelons of the industry itself, then all agreed that what looked strong in females was commiting acts of violence or threatened violence (eg: vase-chucking) against or towards males in music videos because this “showed that they wouldn’t take it lying down?”

Well what a fucking awesome coup that would be, supposing you were some kind of massive chauvinist. Now, I don’t necessarily believe in that conspiracy theory (I think there were some opportunistic females or at least managers who began the ‘women as underdogs in the music industry particularly in guitar music’ myth and that it was a wonderful marketing tool for them that’s useful for other opportunistic females and managers to maintain, for a start) but what is very evident to both myself and (I presume) everyone else is that it is absolutely not ok to glamourise attacking people and their property as “empowering.”

As Nietzsche would have it, it is very empowering. The exertion of your will over stuff and other people; great way to spend an afternoon, I’m sure. The point is, though: why is it ok for Kelly Clarkson to do this and Avril Lavigne to do this and Ciara to throw paint over Enrique’s car and for a thousand other music videos where women hit, shove, slap or taunt men (especially the ones where some poor bloke ends up tied up and beaten, which I can’t remember any of off the top of my head but there definitely are quite a few) when it would absolutely not be ok for it to be the other way around?

Why, of course, that’s female empowerment. Anyway, women hitting men doesn’t count does it because men are big and strong and won’t mind. And you can wreck men’s shit because they have well-paid jobs, unlike women, so can afford to replace it. And you can glamourise all this because …oooh, I don’t know, maybe it sells?

People will say ‘OOH BUT THERE IS APPALLING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN’ and they will be right. Yes, yes there is. I have a degree in that sort of thing, I know this very well. That doesn’t actually make violence against men ok, though; it’s just an assbackwards idea that gratuitous aggression portrayed as insignificant could make you seem more able to stand up to anything. Women committing violence being accepted as “not serious” merely accentuates a perceived gender gap in srs bsns and turns the whole thing into bullshit.

I’m about 5’10″ and used to heft books around for a living; if I really punched (as opposed to jokey on-the-arm sort of punches that most friends exchange when someone kills someone else for the 45th time on Halo 3 or whatever) most men I know it would probably hurt them a lot. It would not be at all funny and it would not be at all ok. Equally, it would not be at all funny or at all ok if I was 4’8″ and weighed 5st. It’s just not fucking funny. It’s certainly not empowering to suggest that it is, either.

I’ve not, so far, seen people making the complementary complaint about cBeebies ‘Big Cook, Little Cook’. A long description of the show can be found on an old post on Richard Herring’s blog, but in short the eponymous cooks have to cook for a character from nursery rhymes or fairy tales (Snow White, Old Macdonald). The problem is that as a show meant to inspire children to cook, the options are limited to recipes involving mashing together cottage cheese, crushed up crackers, toast and food colouring, with specially shaped-cutters (stars, fish, etc) to theme it up a bit. Though there is some oven-action it’s limited as they have to keep reminding you to “Get your adult helper to do this as the oven is hot hot hot!”.

So here we have uninspired cooking by a couple of height-mismatched fools for a fabulous-character from myth/fable WHO YOU NEVER SEE. The cooks just get a nice message through the café hatch saying “I loved my mashed banana sandwiches cut in the shape of the Empire State Building, love Kong”.

FORMAT SWAP

If Heston’s childish-wonder-meets-Wilf-Lunn-science approach to cooking can make soup and a magical drink straight out of the pages of Alice in Wonderland, why not give HIM the fairy-tale guests. Leave Big Cook Ben and Little Cook Small to stuff their blue cottage-cheese sculptures into the faces of Kim and Aggie or whoever the hell else they dredge up.

Another difference will be that as a lot of the Heston show was in the presentation — the theatre — of presenting the food to the diners, the fabulous characters have to actually appear via CGI/animatronics. Even better, that means the celebrities wouldn’t appear on BCLC. They just leave their little card of thanks: ‘Food is nice – Matthew Fort’.

So you get 20 minutes of him off the IT crowd and her off of teachers doing pretty standard “embarrassment and swearing” comedy set in a thinly-veiled Xfm clone and it kind of works cos chris o’dowd is good at that sort of thing, and the script is a bit obvious but has some decent set-ups and one-liners and visually it’s pretty decent, not unlike Nathan Barley but without the vicious, crippling evil that made NB so wonderful.

But then, because he’s an indie DJ at an indie radio station you get five minutes of the guillemots or the wombats playing a song “in session” in the studio whilst the characters occasionally talk over the top of it. It’s really weird. Really really weird. It’s not like in, eg The Young Ones where a band would suddenly appear for no reason, clearly the production company has thought about this and sold these slots (and it appears future bands include Ladyhawke and The Subways) as a way of increasing their income stream. And, they’ve even monetarised the playlists of the music in the show, with handy click-throughs to 7digital so you can buy what you’ve heard…

The basic premise of the Law & Order franchise is that you the viewer get to see two consecutive phases of the story – the crime doesn’t just have to be solved, it must be successfully prosecuted too! The first half of the action has the police doing their investigation, then it switches to the offices of the Crown Prosecution Service, and neatly ends with the judge banging his gavel and tickertape falling from the ceiling. Sort of.

But the tenuous similarities to Nintendo’s Phoenix Wright DS series don’t stop there! Fans of PW will be heartened to know that Freema Agyeman takes on the Maya Fey role, contributing lots of enthusiasm, moralising and magically conjuring up from nowhere a piece of incriminating evidence that will GET THE BADDIE. Bradley Walsh is adopts the character of Detective Gumshoe – the hapless cop who can’t do his own tie up – and there’s even an evil defence lawyer who will stop at nothing to win.

Sadly, Law & Order:UK suffers from the fact that the UK legal system isn’t very exciting. I’m sure they could embellish it a bit for dramatic effect? In Phoenix Wright for example, trials are only allowed to be three days long and you are guilty until proven innocent! If you spend all your time umming and aahing about aiming for a conviction but with a lower sentence blah blah blah, there’s no real opportunity for the defendant to reveal that he is actually the prosecutor’s long lost brother who lost his memory when he witnessed their father being murdered by their goldfish fourteen years ago etc.

The makers have kept the choppy directing style (and the black-background scene captions) from the US version – my viewing companion stated that the juddery camerawork was making him feel rather nauseous (admittedly he had just recovered from a bout of gastroenteritis) but I thought this rather suited the haphazard narrative and snappy script.

However the main thing that bothered me was this: being a Londoner that travels through Kings Cross most days, having Walsh and his copper chum wandering up Pentonville Road bemoaning the loss of community spirit through luxury flat redevelopments seemed downright WEIRD (and 18 months out of date). I’m sure CSI would seem weird too if I lived in Las Vegas, but the balance of fiction and well-trodden reality needs careful attention if you’re trying to do a serious drama. It’s a bit different if the familiar national monument is being used as a backdrop for Captain Jack defeating aliens with a pair of Y-fronts and an egg whisk. That’s patriotism, you see. L&O:UK is more likely to irritate Londoners and (I expect) fail to engage the rest of the country at all.

Also, I swear at one point they were walking past Cumming Street WITHOUT LAUGHING which everyone knows is impossible. I don’t think I’ll bother watching next week’s episode.

To my great enjoyment, these included a couple of Swedish TV movies – with subtitles and everything! There was an ulterior motive, however. It was all a lead-in, a softening-up, to get me hooked on BBC One’s English adaptation of the books – starring Kenneth Branagh as the titular Swede.

But our Ken doesn’t really pull it off.

Branagh has always come across to me as something of a lightweight. This is curious because he aggressively pursues the meatiest, weightiest, manliest roles he can find: from Henry V to his surprise appearance at the end of the BBC’s 10 Days to War as a hardened American general who – hmm – shows up to deliver a rousing speech to his troops. Things seem to come too easily to him. Is it the blond hair? The puckish face which, despite its evidently increasing age, does not appear that ruffled by life’s slings and arrows? Whichever it is, Branagh suffers from the same curse of good looks as a host of other capable male leads. Which brings us to his new show, Wallander.

Wallander needs to be a bit ugly. Beset with diabetes, perpetually on the verge of 50, overweight, underexercised, and divorced, he’s a classic fictional detective – human in ways we can sympathize with but with a clarity of intuition that we all aspire to. In Sweden he has mainly been played by Rolf Lassgård, an authoritatively plump man who does share one distinctive feature with Brananagh, a total lack of lips. BBC Four, however, presented us with the new Swedish series, in which he’s played by Krister Henriksson*, who appears to have been following doctor’s orders. He’s slimmer now, but his pockmarked, rugged face and cavernous eye sockets tell you everything you need to know: this man has ghosts to chase away and his weapon of choice is probably whisky.

Branagh just doesn’t give you this – he scowls a lot and stomps around but underneath it there’s a fundamental cheeriness he just can’t shake.

In fact, the look of the show itself betrays an overweening concern for glossiness over the breezeblock reality of policing. It’s the first British programme to use the hot new camera “Red One” and if its light-metered-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life sheen is any indication the camera is no slouch at its job of taking pictures very fast. The police station looks like a Chanel advert, and the yellow rapeseed in the countryside practically blinded me. Everything looks lustrous and moody, including Wallander’s capacious flat, which is all thick blond planes of wood and free of clutter. A bit like Branagh himself.

* I have now read “One Step Behind”, and I was thinking of Henriksson on every page. He fits the part like a glove and I only hope that someone out there translates the Swedish films so I get a chance to watch the rest of them.

It’s certain that Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” will be the Christmas #1. But which version? PR Media Blog reports on a Facebook campaign to put Jeff Buckley’s version at #1 instead of the version by X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke.

The blog post sets up the battle as old v new media, but also as the manipulative hand of S.Cowell vs “the people”. A quick Twitter search for “Hallelujah” seems to back this up. “Stop X-Factor getting to number 1, buy Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah”. “Buckley’s is still my favourite version of Hallelujah and this fact will not do me any favours.” “attention pundits: Stop mis-interpreting “Hallelujah”. It is not about redemption. Nor is it a song of Hope.”

Though other notes are being struck: “Oh I loved the hallelujah song”. “did not follow X-Factor but has just listened to Hallelujah and choked up a bit.” The reactions – whichever version they favour – suggest that the pop critic Mike Barthel was right when, in his excellent 2007 paper on the song, he described its appeal as lying in its intimacy – it’s a song that, however mainstream it becomes, always feels like a personal discovery to its fans.

So no wonder the anti-Cowell brigade, busily organising themselves on Facebook, feel personally slighted by his promotion of the song in this new version – complete with redemptive key change (O horror!). But as Barthel precisely explores, the canonisation of the Buckley version was itself the culmination of a process of discovery and development of the song. The John Cale version that Buckley’s is based on was used in Shrek and Scrubs; Buckley’s own cover surfaced in The OC and a host of other teen dramas – it became a shorthand for sorrow. Barthel also argues that Buckley’s cover represented a “flattening” of the song’s meaning, emphasising its misery and desolation at the expense of its other dimensions. So perhaps the key change is something of a return to the source! Either way it suggests the idea of a “definitive” – rather than a “previously most famous” – version of this particular song is a bit of a chimera.

The anti-Cowell, pro-Buckley posse undoubtedly feel a sincere connection to “Hallelujah”, but the sheer intensity of its recent usage makes it very likely that the people wanting to stop Cowell’s “desecration” of the song themselves found out about it via ‘old’ media – the cinema, the TV, a BBC iPlayer advert maybe… Of course it doesn’t matter a jot how a fan discovered a song – unless you’re constructing a narrative setting the authentic fans against the newbies, of course. The PR Media Blog story rests on the idea that the social networkers are ‘the people’, and the viewers buying Alex Burke’s new version are somehow not – as if joining a Facebook group was somehow far more effortful than taking part in a phone vote. But joining one feels more individual, which is the great advantage social media organisation has – “donating your status to Obama” or “Rickrolling Jeff Buckley to the top of the charts” are both means of conspicuous participation.

Like the ‘old v new media’ story itself, the clash of the “Hallelujah”s is a clash of early majority vs late majority. The uptake of the song had reached a plateau until Jason Castro’s rendition on American Idol helped open up a big potential new audience for it, but it was already mainstream. It’s the qualities that make it hitworthy – its effectiveness in creating a link between listener and song – that also create the outrage among many of its existing fans. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Buckley fans get their way – there’s a recent micro-tradition of tweaking authority’s beard when it comes to the Xmas No.1 race: Gary Jules’ cover of “Mad World” and Nizlopi’s “JCB Song” were both promoted as representing a kind of authenticity amongst the tinsel and tat – Buckley could build a similar momentum.

Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business, the everyday tale of celeb beer brewing (and how peed off must Richard Fox be that he’s not in the title?) might be exactly the sort of programme you’d expect us here at FT to be interested in, and we are, but mainly due to our EXCITING CAMEO in said programme! In programme two about 35 minutes in, a focus group is used and there, holding forth on the palatability of their brew is Pete, with me sitting silently (in the clip anyway) behind him.

The important thing to note about the Morrissey-Fox Blonde is that it may be the most tasteless ale I’ve ever had. It makes Discovery taste like Westmalle Triple, it’s about half a step above tap water in the complexity stakes. Before arriving at the focus group (which we knew was being filmed but not why) I had two theories, either it was going to be some sort of celeb beer or that it was ALCOHOL-FREE ALE and for about the first five minutes I honestly thought it was the latter, it has that slight bready taste you get from kaliber.

And Morrissey thinks this blandness is a good thing because like Dan Brown, Indiana Jones and Monty Python before him he is searching for THE HOLY GRAIL, a bitter that lager drinkers will buy. It is an entirely fruitless* task, it’s like trying to get football obsessives into rugby, or indie kids into heavy metal (Oi isn’t heavy metal) because although to the outsider they appear to share similar characteristics and though there may be a few outliers who cross over, they are entirely different beasts and, when you have a microbrewery that can only make three barrels a week, why would you even want to go for that market where Fullers,Youngs and other brewers with hundreds of years of experience have failed? Why not try and make something interesting? OK, the boys down the road who brew their first batch call them bastards for getting a decent recipe on their first attempt, but they also damn it with their “oh, very drinkable” praise, which is clearly brewerese for “this tastes of nothing”.

The other guys in the focus group, none of whom seemed to be primarily ale drinkers, reacted the way i think Morrissey was expecting, even suggesting, after some quite heavy prompting, that (holy grail pt 2!!!) their girlfriends would drink it (imagine that, WIMMIN drinking ale! now some of my best friends are both wimmin and ale drinkers (even CAMRA members) and i’m pretty sure they would find this as unpalatable as I did)!

He actually says here:

If Kronenbourg is the Coldplay of the beer world, then my own beer is like John Lennon and Julie Christie driving through London in a silver Jaguar E-Type circa 1967 with The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset blasting out of the speakers.

no it isn’t mate, it’s James Blunt at best.

Also, [SPOILERS FOR PART THREE] I’ve just found this press release from Tesco, which makes me weep into my pint of Nero/Deuchars/Landlord/insert your favourite ale here

Mind you, with my track record on success or failure of Guinness Red (spotted in the wild in Watford O’Neills on Saturday), it’ll probably go on to be a roaring success…

*although, somehow, the cidermakers (fruitless? cidermakers? oh please yourselves) have managed it…

(The context of the question, best forgotten, sadly is from plugging an unusually shit and unncecessary book by a DJ of similar qualities.)

This immediately makes Night Garden more attractive viewing for nostalgist parents like me than Teletubbies, whose gentle gobbledigook is crack to the one-year old mind but harder going for Dad and Mum. The budget’s noticeably higher too – ITNG looks extremely classy, and in a further sop to middle-class parental sensibilities it even has a proper theme tune. As the programme is meant for a slightly older audience than Teletubbies, there are even actual stories, though they’re glacially paced: a typical episode has a character losing something, then asking every other character in turn if they’ve found it. Since each character has their own theme song and special dance the half hour fills up quite quickly. As yet, though, I’ve not seen an episode which has the near-random wonder of some bits of Teletubbies – those Winsor McCay moments when (for example) suddenly Tubbyland would fill with water and three ferries would sail through it and then vanish. Existence and events are less arbitrary for ITNG’s audience, and the show follows suit. But luckily, it puts its wonder elsewhere.

What makes Night Garden strange isn’t the action of the episode, but the location. I’m not really talking about the Night Garden itself, beautifully realised though it is (a sort of toddler Portmeiron, complete with giant bouncing balloons), but the metaphysics of the show. Each episode starts with a different child being lulled to sleep by a parent, who tells them about the show’s hero, Iggle Piggle, who is himself going to sleep in the tiny boat which seems to be his only home. The boat is adrift on an endless sea in an endless dark – we don’t know where it’s going, or why, only that as each episode begins Iggle Piggle is furling his sail and lighting his light, and as he falls asleep the stars above HIM turn to flowers in the Night Garden.

The week’s jolly adventure then happens, and at the end the inhabitants of the Garden go to sleep, leaving Iggle Piggle awake and alone in the darkening Garden. The kindly narrator tells him not to worry, and we pan out to find him asleep and drifting in his boat.

So to recap: Iggle Piggle is a kind of universal child adrift in a sort of womb-sea of the collective unconscious, a deeper layer of which turns out to be the Night Garden, where he can play but never truly belong – and which children can’t access directly, only through this sailor intermediary. To make the sea scenes more haunting, they’re filmed in stop-motion compared to the smooth film of framing scene and Garden. This has the effect of increasing their weird unreality for the viewer.

Judging by the success of ITNG it’s struck a chord among kids and parents – my one-year-old adores it – but what strikes me is that the show doesn’t need the framing seascape at all: on paper it would work just as well to have Iggle Piggle be a paid up member of the Night Garden crew, and simply have the child dream about them. The sea scenes – which are always the same and very short – take us into another place entirely, tapping into something much more primal that won’t soon leave the memory of this generation of kids.

But head over to the BBC page for television coverage of the Olympics and try viewing the listings for fencing. Strange, no? It hasn’t – like baseball – been voted out (baseball will make its last Olympics appearance in Beijing this year). It’s just not being shown by the BBC.

Back in June, when the BBC’s coverage was being hammered out once and for all, there was only one Briton expected to compete in any fencing event. That was Alex O’Connell, who’s handy with a sabre – one of the three swords in fencing along with epée (thinner) and foil (the thinnest). Since then, in a mysterious ruffling of cloaks, the sport’s international governing body has decreed that Finchley’s Richard Kruse – a foil man – and Martina Emanuel – also foil – will get to stab a little in Beijing.

Fencing isn’t one of those Olympic sports where you’re washed up by the time you’re university age. At 22, Emanuel is a little green for a fencer – she’s mainly trying to get experience for 2012. (She also trains, lives, and was born in Italy. Hmm. British mum, apparently.) But there are high hopes for 24-year-old Kruse, who some say is Britain’s best shot at the country’s first fencing medal since 1964.

Today, American Mariel Zagunis took the gold in women’s sabre. (Americans won bronze and silver, too). Zagunis thus repeats as gold medalist. She won in 2004 – the first gold for an American fencer in 100 years – after a last-minute reshuffle allowed her to join her compatriots in Athens. So there’s hope for Richard Kruse yet. It’s just too bad his friends won’t get to tune in. Especially after he took the time to present this “fencing for beginners” guide for… BBC Sport.

Much has been written about the politics of Wall-E (from its anti-obesity scare tactics to its not exactly hidden green agenda). What I think is Wall-E’s real legacy however is being a film which can expand and signpost new areas of interest for kids. Rather than the usual whiz-bang action adventure that children’s films tend to be these days, it is a bit more thoughtful, and lays the seeds for kids to discover whole new worlds of fiction. Wall-E is clearly a well made science fiction tale, posing some standard early sci-fi questions* – opening the air-lock to an Aladdin’s Space Cruiser of speculative fiction. But it is also a hefty emotional romance, tinged with heartbreak and sweeping rescues. You’ll not find many a Mills & Boon about robots, but you will find analogs of this plot. It also contains within it two constant nagging reprieves from Hello Dolly, so it could even stir an affection for musicals.

Pixar have always pushed innovative boundaries with all of their films, but now the technology has been tamed they seem just as interested in pushing the kind of stories traditionally dished up to kids. The film it reminded me tonally more than anything was ET (though without quite the devastating power of that film). Which also leads me to a slightly disquieting thought. I am sure the emotional heft of ET has left me more pro-alien than anti, and I daresay Wall-E does much the same for robots. Which could of course be a bad thing. Wall-E may be creating a generation who, for one, will embrace their robot overlords. Romantically. With hugs.

*Not just about recycling, rubbish and waste disposal, but also nature of the self, mind/body dualism and what emotions really are. Though the biggest question I came out with was how exactly did the various generations of morbidly obese humans pro-create?

In The Forbidden Kingdom, Jet Li pays the Monkey King with some awesome stick on whiskers. However it eschews the traditional story of Journey To The West and instead turns him into stone in the first third. This would be a waste of Jet Li, if he didn’t also play a mysterious monk who wants to save the Monkey King. In this his is aided in a fashion by Jackie Chan (after the obligatory meet-up misunderstanding) who appears to be reprising his breakthrough role as the Drunken Master. Both of them are actually aiding the Chosen One – who for some reason is a kung-fu fan teenager from Boston who has been transported in time for hilarious (read tedious) anachronism jokes. On the way the battle the Bride With White Hair, and hundreds of usual Wuxia army henchmen. Basically The Forbidden Army is a PG rated primer into kung-fu movies which should have been made twenty years ago. Not only would I have been young enough to enjoy it properly, but Chan and Li would have been young enough to make their pair really something special. Whilst they are impressive for old geezers, old geezers they remain and the film rests a little too much on their past glories. Whilst forgetting that in the meantime we’ve see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and possibly loads of other Hong Kong movies to make this kid friendly tale seem a little tame.

Nevertheless, there is something nice about seeing Li and Chan together. And like many Hong Kong classics, once it gets their obligatory fight out of the way, there is only one thing left to do. A sequence in which Jet Li pisses all over Jackie Chan. Literally. (When I mentioned this scene to a number of people they all reacted, unsurprised as if this is exactly what they expect from a Hong Kong action comedy). Here you can watch the highlight of the movie, where Jackie prayed for rain, but instead get u-RAIN:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C7KU6a__Tw

So not a proper Monkey movie then. Though Stephen Chow is rumoured to be making one for 2010 – which would be something worth seeing. As, maybe, would be the Journey To The West opera which is on at the ENO at the moment which seems to be fortuitously timed with the BBC advertising it using it in for their Olympic coverage.

(By the way watch this space for OUR exciting Olympic coverage!!!)

Oh sure, the site boasts more than 22 million “comments, posts, plays and views”, but those comments and posts are all from OTHER sites like YouTube, last.fm, iTunes, myspace, and the like. Sound Index sent automated “robot” scripts to these sites looking for the names of bands, fed what it found into some kind of magic algorithm, and produced a constantly updated list of the 1000 buzziest bands on the planet. Or well, the English-speaking planet. Probably. Slap some shiny, gumdrop-like buttons on the results, organise things with a direct rip-off of the iTunes “Coverflow” feature and hey presto.. well, what exactly?

The subcontractors who made it, Nova Rising, had some heady early expectations that it could be “the chart to replace the Top 40″. And indeed, the TV show Sound (for it is that which the Index is named after) is the BBC’s attempt to make up for the lack of live chart music on television precipitated by the cancellation of Top of the Pops.

One could argue that the Top 40 was the original “web 2.0″ concept. The songs are all written, performed and recorded by other people; their order of presentation each week is determined by millions of people’s individual listening and buying habits; all you have to do is play the songs. Brilliant! For Top of the Pops you’d have to invite a smelly band or two, but even the dancing bits were “user generated”. Just turn on the cameras and away you go.

But Top 40 radio shows and Top of the Pops were popular, when they were popular, because we understood how things worked. If a band sold enough records, it would be – or should be, with ensuing debate – invited on the show. There was no mystery about why a song had reached number one – it had sold the most. But Sound – and even Top of the Pops near the end – introduced a nefarious editorial element. Why are these bands playing?

And with the Sound Index it’s even less clear. The algorithm Nova Rising used for trawling through other sites’ comments threads was developed by IBM and has apparently cost a fortune. IBM’s presentation of some of the challenges involved says that “online comments are absolutely the worst way to find out what is popular… except for all the other ways.”

So, is money really obsolete? Do sales really rate less than 10,000 variations on JAN47 from TAMPA, FL’s contention that “ONE NIGHT ONLY ROX”? I don’t think so. Ultimately the only people who care about this kind of popularity – i.e. aggregate internet buzz – are record labels, and it has been pointed out that they already have Music Week for that sort of thing already.

For those who do care about the pop music horserace of the charts, the Top 40 still exists. And in the absence of a real chart show you can do what my friend Josh and I did when we were seven or eight and had the use of a real cassette tape recorder all to ourselves. You can sing your own versions and play them back, collapsing in laughter. Hey, maybe we could YouTube it. Then we’d get in the Sound Index!

So the hugely indulgent set-up for this season finale – salad of all the companions! – works on levels beyond new-fan service. It works on those levels too, of course, but it’s a final flourish for Davies’ study of what sidekickdom involves, and one Doctor Who with its rotating leads is uniquely placed to deliver. What other show could possibly get so much logical dramatic mileage out of a big cast reunion? If anything I’d have liked to see the Doctor out of action for longer and the assorted companions sorting things out themselves a little more, rather than relying on the man in the big blue box. The “six pilots” payoff scene was the most indulgent, and deserved, bit of all – a little flash of joy before the status quo, or lack of it, resets. It’s not just Donna: every companion is “just a temp” – here was a scene playing with the idea that it shouldn’t be that way. Has there ever been a notionally SF series quite so happy to embrace the sentimental? With RTD moving on, will there ever be again?

This is another level on which the themes of companionship and temping and loss and return resonate, of course: Doctor Who is a TV show for kids, brought back by adults who’d been changed by it, watched by more adults who’d never been quite able to shake it, and now passing it on to kids themselves. The clip-montages of scenes from the last four years were a showy goodbye from Davies; the final scene of the Doctor in the TARDIS, morose and alone, worked just as well. He’s had his faults as Who helmsman - there’ve been plenty of times where I’d have liked to decide for myself that the plot or details weren’t important to an episode, rather than have him rub it in – but “Journey’s End” proved to my satisfaction that he’s always had a grip on the show’s thematic and emotional rudder.

Anyway, they’ve finally got it right, so to celebrate here’s my own list of Who cliffhangers that stick in the brain. Some of these are, I believe, canonically accepted as awesome, others more obscure. The list draws heavily on ones I saw as a kid, the prime time to be shoXoRed by a Who ending… and yes, there will be spoilers!

The “Oh Shit” Cliffhanger: The Ark Part 2
– for those brought up on the strong liquor that is the eeeeooowww sound, the silent cliffhangers of black-and-white era Who are somewhat underwhelming. This First Doctor story is the exception, using the silence to full advantage by letting the implications of the cliffhanger sink in. In The Ark, the TARDIS crew visit a huge spaceship, populated by the remnants of mankind and their servant race, the Monoids, fleeing the destruction of Earth to find a new homeworld. Under construction en voyage – only its torso complete – is a vast statue of a man, which will stand on the new world as an emblem of mankind’s survival. At the end of episode two, the crew jump forward 700 years to find the ship’s journey almost over. They arrive on the bridge and see the completed statue – the camera pans up it to reveal… a Monoid’s one-eyed head carved into the stone. What has happened to mankind? Find out next week!

The Widescreen Cliffhanger: Caves Of Androzani Part 3
– this is often cited as the best Doctor Who cliffhanger ever: the penultimate episode of the Fifth Doctor’s final adventure, with him suffering from terminal poisoning, hijacking the spaceship of the mercenary who’s captured him and sending it hurtling at full speed towards the surface of a planet. In many ways it anticipates New Who: big, noisy, widescreen planet-busting cliffhanger action. But what makes it so awesome is the way Davison, wrestling with the ship’s controls, also gives a speech explaining to the mercenary with remarkable patience exactly why he’s doing what he’s doing. Polite and reasonable to the end: it’s the perfect Fifth Doctor moment.

The Cerebral Cliffhanger: Four To Doomsday Part 2
– another Fifth Doctor story, representative of a short-lived species of cliffhangers based on atmosphere and unfolding plot rather than sheer thrill-power. Several McCoy stories have them, as do stories like “Kinda” and “Warrior’s Gate”: this is my favourite, an incongruously powerful moment in the middle of a slow-building story. A very kindly Ancient Greek dude, who the TARDIS crew have met on a huge spaceship, explains patiently, as if to children, that he is no longer human – “This is the real me”, he says, opening up his chest to remove a hard drive. It’s corny, and it shouldn’t work, but he’s been such a sympathetic character it’s still a shock somehow.

The Behind-The-Sofa Cliffhanger: City Of Death Part 3
– if you watch this now, with a bumbling scientist being aged into a skeleton by the time machine he’s been building, it’s played as much for comedy as anything. However, I was six and I was ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED – it is the one cliffhanger which I simply refused to watch the following week, hiding at the other end of the house and insisting my Dad call me when it was over. For that I had to include it.

The WTF Cliffhanger: Carnival Of Monsters Part 1
– this is another famous one, a Third Doctor story which is notable for how well its first episode builds up weirdness and then resolves it with one extraordinary stroke. The story is quite bold in the way it simply doesn’t connect its two plot strands – the Doctor and Jo on board a 1920s ship which seems to be caught in a time loop, and a pair of galactic carnies trying to pitch their show on a xenophobic planet – until the closing shot, when one of the carnies reaches down inside his machine, and the Doctor is faced with a gigantic hand appearing to pluck the TARDIS away. More “what is going ON?” style cliffhangers, please!

The Nightmare Cliffhanger: The Deadly Assassin Part 2
– set inside the (later much overused) Time Lord Matrix, this sees the Fourth Doctor stuck in a dreamlike landscape, where, as in a nightmare, he gets his foot stuck in a rail and finds himself about to be crushed by an onrushing model train, driven by a sinister figure wearing a gas mask. The direction is the hero here, making the surreal images seem connected and horribly logical and giving real urgency to the Doctor’s imaginary peril.

The ‘Master In Disguise’ Cliffhanger: “Utopia”
– as mentioned in the intro, before this week this was as good as New Who got for its episode ends. They hammered it home a bit, but the “oh look it’s the Master” cliffhanger had never, ever been done well before in what seemed like a grillion old series tries, so they can be forgiven for going a little over the top. And the actual cliffhanger – stuck at the end of time with the TARDIS stolen – is pretty good too!

The Dalek Cliffhanger: Power Of The Daleks Part 2
– most Dalek episode-ends tend to just be some Daleks going “Exterminate!”. There’s nothing wrong with this as a climax really – it’s what Daleks do, after all – but the best ever Dalek cliffhanger is from this Second Doctor story. The Doctor has found an obscure Earth colony planet, struggling for resources, which has happened on a stroke of real luck – faithful and tireless robot servants they’ve salvaged from a crashed ship. We know, and the Doctor knows, that these servants are Daleks, but as the Doctor tries to warn the colonists the Daleks drown him out with an ever-rising chorus of “We! Are! Your! Ser-vants!”.

The Cyberman Cliffhanger: Tomb Of The Cybermen Part 2
– most Cybermen cliffhangers are just marching cybermen: again, a Second Doctor story used them best, the cyber-leader’s flatly inhuman “You belong to us. You will be like us.” both summing up the monsters’ USP and sounding really horrible and scary.

The NOES DONT DO THAT Cliffhanger: The Daemons Episode 1
– a lot of great cliffhangers rely on the Doctor trying to prevent some human or other doing a really really stupid thing. Often, as here, he fails. The Daemons spends its entire first episode building up to the stupid thing, in loving detail – some nice meta-television with the BBC interviewing locals and archaeologists about a (doomed, imminent) dig, the Third Doctor gradually realising that something is very very wrong. Will he prevent the human fools from unleashing forces they can’t possibly understand? Come off it.

The Next Episode Trailer Special Bonus Cliffhanger: “Bad Wolf” – instead of cliffhangers New Who has the “Next….” trailer, which was clumsily used at first, often revealing too much or getting in the way of the previous story. The trailer at the end of “Bad Wolf”, coming after a servicable ZOMG Daleks finish, was much better – a bonus extra cliffhanger, really, the booming “THEY SURVIVED THROUGH ME” at the end pitching fans into a world of speculation they hadn’t even known existed.