Werewolves, Zombies, and Freddy Krueger.

It's well established that if a horror film is a success (and sometimes even when one isn't) that there will be a sequel, often many sequels, a franchise essentially. It's also well established that, in the vast majority of cases, the sequel won't be as good as the original film. So, following last year's Monsters on the Couch talk, Dr Brian Sharpless was back in The Star of Greenwich and back with Greenwich Skeptics in the pub to deliver his follow up, Monsters on the Couch - The Sequel.

This second installment, though, was just as good as the first and even though it, briefly, covered some of the same ground there was enough new stuff to make it a very worthwhile night out during a week when I've started a new job and have been trying to get to bed early. Even if there may be monsters under that bed. Well, it is nearly Hallowe'en. Something that surely played a part in scheduling the talk for this time of year!

Dr Sharpless is good, he knows his stuff but he keeps it pretty jovial - if a little dark, and you get the impression he could talk all night on the subject of horror films and the psychological factors that underpin and inspire them. But, last night, he narrowed it down to three subjects:- werewolves, zombies, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy fucking Krueger again. Though, to be honest, I came away feeling more favourable towards the ubiquitous stripey jumpered slasher than I have in the past.

But more of that later. First the werewolves (which was only right when there was a full moon in the sky). Hollywood werewolves have got a lot of different looks, some are mostly wolf (An American Werewolf in London) and some are mostly men (Lon Chaney's Wolf Man) and there are plenty that are somewhere in between. Werewolves, in the movies, aren't born, they're made. Think again of An American Werewolf in London.

They're usually aggressive or even murderous but they can be killed by silver or fire or even guns or other conventional weapons. Though they can regenerate very quickly, generally. If a film werewolf is injured that injury carries forward to the man when he reverts back. Folkloric werewolves come into being a very different way.

Via a magic girdle (which, apparently, you can buy in Zara!) or through an act of cannibalism. Ginger haired people and bastards (children of unwed parents, not Tory voters) are more susceptible to becoming werewolves than others but the werewolves of Estonia have the best way of turning you into a werewolf. They simply break into your house and drink all your beer. In fact, you can become an Estonian werewolf simply by sharing a beer with one. Cheers to that!

Another way to become a werewolf, which sounds much more hard work and a lot less fun, is to rub a salve of bird's blood, hemlock, wolfsbane, celery, and various other seemingly random ingredients into your skin. I'd rather go to Tallinn and crack open a Double Bock with one of those hairy handed gents. But if you find yourself troubled by a werewolf, and they can be trouble - don't doubt it, you need to stab them three times in the exact same place.

Or, and this sounds like a faff, keep it kneeling in the exact same spot for one hundred years. At which point it won't die but will revert back to being a man. Though, you'll be dead by then so it's immaterial. In Denmark, the method is much easier. You simply tell a werewolf that they are a werewolf and they stop being a werewolf. Job's a good 'un.

Silver bullets, unlike in the movies, are useless and have no affect on folkloric werewolves. So where does this werewolf thing come from. Sufferers of lyncathropy, and other related diseases, have been treated for depression, schizophrenia, hallucinations, and other disorders and in some cases, but not all, there has been some success in curing people who not only believe they have been turned into wolves but believe they have been turned into dogs, cats, gerbils, frogs, and even rhinos.

Dr Sharpless reckons we like werewolf stories and werewolf movies because wolves were, for much of human history, a real and legitimate threat but he also thinks there's something about being attracted to forces beyond our control - even if those forces come from inside us. Essentially, we fear our own dark side and werewolves represent that dark side.

As do zombies and horror movie zombies, like their werewolf cousins, don't sync up with folkloric zombies at all. Horror zombies are a mix of three things. Norse draugrs, ghouls, and Haitian zombis (the correct spelling). Draugrs are undead vikings that live in ancient hollow Scandinavian burial mounds where the vikings buried their treasure and they don't walk, they run. They run fast. They're also supernaturally strong and they never get tired.

On top of that they hold grudges and they seem to choose Christmas, specifically, as a time of year when they act on those grudges. They are never born and they are always made, You can become a draugr if your corpse remains unburied, if you're killed by another draugr, or, rather harshly, if  you're inappropriately dressed.

Ghouls are demons who feed on the flesh of human beings, dead or alive. The western idea of the ghoul actually comes from an eccentric translation of the Arabian Nights and you can kill a ghoul with one well placed powerful blow. But if you fail with that first blow, you will have to strike it at least one hundred times to kill it. For some reason.

Haitian zombis are quite different to horror zombies. They're non-violent vegetarians who refuse to even eat salt and have all their meals served on banana leaves (not sure who serves them, are there zombi waiters out there?). They're more likely to run away from you than run after you and they can't create new zombis. In fact, they're tireless workers that labour in flaming hot sugar cane fields throughout long Caribbean summers.

They don't seem to complain but the horror zombie doesn't like being (un)dead. It hurts being dead and the only thing that makes the pain go away is feasting on human flesh. Cotard's syndrome is a thankfully rare condition in which the sufferer believes they are dead. Often the sufferer will be nihilistic, undergoing an experience of depersonalisation, very depressed, psychotic, or, possibly, have brain lesions, MS, or Parkinson's disease. Quite often they will feel suicidal - despite the fact that they believe they are already dead.

Possibly the most well known sufferer of Cotard's syndrome was the now aptly named Dead (who died, aged 22, in 1991 - suicide) from the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. Dead, or Per as his mum called him, used to bury his clothes in graveyards before wearing them and slept with dead animals under his bed so he would smell like death.

He took it as far as you could, really. But zombie movies, for most of us, are pure escapement. They're popular because they're a break from the sometimes frustrating routines of life, they safely activate a disgust response that many of us secretly desire, and they represent siege situations very very well. For our ancestors (especially if you're descended from the Mongols or the Huns) siege situations were very real and very dangerous.

Which bring us to the not very real Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Johnny Depp's first ever film I found out last night). A film about teenagers in America who keep having scary dreams about Krueger before the man himself starts attacking and killing them - both in their dreams and their real lives.

Krueger, in the film, had been a real life child who had been burned to death by the parents of the teenagers now being attacked by him. He was after revenge and the film, like many horrors, played very well on the fact that we are most vulnerable when we're asleep - and when it's dark.

Dr Sharpless talked a bit about the inspirations for the first Nightmare on Elm Street film and some of that was covered in last year's talk/blog but what wasn't was his belief that it may have been, at least partly, inspired by the Hmong people of South East Asia. Many of whom became refugees from Cambodia when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over and turned the country into a bloodbath.

The Hmong people were so worried that Pol Pot's killers would catch up with them that they tried not to sleep. They drank as much coffee as they could and they set alarm clocks to go off every twenty minutes all in a forlorn hope to avoid the killers and to avoid SUNDS (sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome) and it is SUNDS, which can be found globally - though is very rare, that may also be something that Wes Craven factored into his film.

And that was it. The walk hung together better than my account of it but I hope you get some idea of how interesting, and fun, it was. There was a Q&A afterwards which took in dragons, witches, elves, emus, time travel, djinns, Freud, The Exorcist, furries, TikTok, BDSM, sleep paralysis, Slenderman, Indiana Jones, social contagion, film noir, and a dribbling hag that lives in a Welsh castle and then it was time to head home for a relatively early, and totally sober, night and, yes, I slept well thankyou very much.

Thanks to Dr Brian Sharpless for the talk, to Professor Chris French and The Star of Greenwich for hosting, to Goddard's Pie & Mash for the tasty food (and warming cuppa) that stopped my stomach from rumbling during the bits about cannibalism, and to Jade for joining me and presenting me with a cute Nessie (Loch Ness Monster) from her recent trip to Scotland. Maybe Dr Sharpless can do Nessie next time. I mean, a trilogy of horror themed talks would still be a long way off the astronomical cricket scores that Halloween and Friday the 13th have notched up. 

Bolton Wanderers:Alma's Not Normal S2.

Alma Nuttall (Sophie Willan) is back in Bolton. She's all dressed in pink, riding a pink Vespa named Julie - after Julie Walters, and wearing a coat, that Barbara Ellen brilliantly described in The Observer, that "looks as if she's skinned Bagpuss", and she's quite unrepentant that the success she thought she so richly deserved, and did deserve, only saw her playing 'tree number two' in a play called The Silent Forest of Diversity.

Her mum, Lin (Siobhan Finneran), is back in what she calls the "guinea pig farm" and what others would describe as a medium secure ward where she's got "very into witchcraft", and her nan, Joan (Lorraine Ashbourne), still routinely decked out in leopard print apart from one surprising topless scene, is treating Lin's boyfriend Jim (Nicholas Asbury) like a house pet. He's not even allowed to use the kettle.

This all seems ripe for comedic gold but, to begin with, the second series of Alma's Not Normal (BBC1/iPlayer, created and written by Willan herself and directed by Andrew Chaplin) disappoints. The first few jokes, be they slapstick or observational, simply don't land. Joan swapping the ciggies for party blowers really isn't as funny as everyone involved seems to think and the accidental ordering of one hundred pinatas for a Mexican night at Alma's friend's Leanne's (Jayde Adams) bar, which she won in a game of strip poker, simply made me go hmmm.

Like C&C Music Factory. But then something strange happens. It gets better - and then better again. I don't know if it's case of sinking into Alma's world or not but I actually found it got much funnier as the series went on while at the same time being very sweet in places and, on occasions, emotional. In fact, a lot more emotional than you may expect from such a show.

There is pathos and there is bathos and the two of them are sewn together quite brilliantly. Towards the end of the first episode, Joan reveals to Alma that she has lung cancer and that, of course, adds a bittersweet edge to everything that follows. Be it a trip to Blackpool, Alma playing a ghost in a Ghouls'R'Us experience, or Alma tracking her dad (Richard, played by Craig Parkinson) down only to find he's not Richard Ashcroft from The Verve after all. Though he is a tool so he's not that different.

In a world of cheeky Vimtos, LADBible, Fred Dibnah, fish'n'chip shops, pop tarts, vapes, Deliveroo, and Warburton's extra toasty loaves with jam much of the humour comes from Alma's eccentric and dysfunctional family as well as the cast of strange characters that make up Alma's life in Bolton. Demonstrating that the show has some pull there's some big names rock up for cameo roles.

Steve Pemberton plays Uncle Dickie, Julie Hesmondhalgh is Aunty Ange, and Nick Mohammed is Jules, an unorthodox and frankly useless solicitor who takes on Lin's case with predictable disastrous results. Less well known, but equally good, are Selena Mosinski has light-fingered Auntie Evie, Ash Hunter as Alma's brief love interest Sam, Jemma Churchill as well meaning neighbour Sandra, and Kenneth Collard as Alma's hopeless agent David. Beleagured David's office is a stock cupboard in the shop where he packs shelves in his real job. His 'agency' is called Dedicated Talent Monkey.

Then there's Dave Spikey's Ian who coaches wannabe comedians and thinks he's 'unique' because he's embraced his Internet rage. Ian has split up with his wife, quite standard for keyboard warriors I understand, and has a new stand up show called "Washing Up Alone Again". 

That's moderately funny as is Alma telling Joan "you look like Bet Lynch has thrown up on you", the traffic light dating night at Leanne's bar, and Jim dressing as a skeleton to a funeral because they "didn't have 'owt black". Funnier still is Joan saying she'd rather drink her own piss than accept Sandra's invitation to Sunday service, Joan (again) claiming that her bucket list includes meeting Prince (who died in 2016), and when, during a game of crazy golf, Alma calls somebody "Cunty McFuckface".

It's puerile but I couldn't help laughing and Alma's Not Normal seems to work best when the jokes are crude or when it goes full steam into the emotions of the chief protagonists. There's a nifty soundtrack (The Specials, Blondie, Shaggy, Amyl & The Sniffers, The Nolans, The Lovely Eggs, Marlena Shaw, Kylie Minogue, Labi Siffre, and George Formby) that keeps the whole thing moving and there's a still relevant dig about the cruel Tory programme of austerity (cue still pictures of David Cameron and George Osborne looking unbearably smug) and the damage it caused to communities like the one Alma and her family live in.

But more than anything else, there's a sense of lovable, yet frustrating, eccentric people trying to make the most of their lives, trying to make each other laugh, and, in the case of Sophie Willan, trying to make us laugh too. It took her a while, she didn't choose the easy route, but she got there in the end. Alma may not be normal but she'd be a lot less interesting if she was.

Fleapit revisited:The Substance.

"Pretty girls should always smile" - Harvey

Imagine absolutely hating somebody, but also needing them so much that you simply couldn't live without them. Then imagine that person that you both hate and need is yourself. Yet also another person at the same time. That the two cannot exist without the one and that the one cannot exist without the two.

French director Coralie Fargeat's new film The Substance is absolutely fucking bonkers. It's brilliant, it's hugely audacious, it's bitingly satirical, it's gory, it's violent, and, at times, it's even funny. But it's also as a mad as a box of frogs, as mad as a Kemi Badenoch press conference. Though, unlike the latter, it's got a strong, and addictive, narrative arc and an inner logic.

That inner logic is pushed to ridiculous extremes in a film that seems to me to be inspired by many other fantastic directors (Dario Argento, the Peter Jackson of Braindead and Bad Taste, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman - in its vision of modernity and futuristic invention not quite working in the way they're supposed to, and, most of all, David Cronenberg's body horror) but, like Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things earlier this year, is resolutely its own thing. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a fading Hollywood star. Literally judging by her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She's now fifty years old (Moore is playing a character more than a decade younger than her real age and pulls it off easily, she looks amazing - in more ways than you mighgt expect) and hosting a popular aerobics show.

 

When she overhears her producer, Randy - a Willy Wonka clone who looks like he belongs on some kind of sex offender's register (Dennis Quaid), talk about replacing her with a younger woman and then witnesses her poster being torn down as she drives through L.A., she's so overcome she has a pretty nasty car crash. She's not hurt but just before being released a male nurse (Robin Greer) passes her the details of something called The Substance which promises to deliver a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of one's self.

Elisabeth, eventually, decides to give it a go and, guess what?, it creates more problems than it solves. The kit (consisting of scissors, syringes, strangely coloured liquids, and food bags), as promised, provides a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of Elisabeth. Sue (Margaret Qualley) - who arrives in a scene reminiscent of both Alien and An American Werewolf In London - but gorier. Sue soon finds herself taking Elisabeth's job and much of her life.

The shady organisation that control The Substance give Elisabeth/Sue strict rules on how it should be used but it's not long before those rules are being flaunted, abused, and ignored and that proves to be unwise for all concerned. What begins as a biting satire ramps up into a full on gorefest yet retains its sardonic edge right up until the very last scene.

The men in The Substance are all either lecherous, exploitative, noisy eaters, or stupid (Elisabeth/Sue's neighbour, Oliver (Gore Abrams), may as well have bulging eyeballs and a drooling tongue hanging out) and in a verite drama this would be disappointingly one note. But this is satire and both men and women are in Forgeat's line of fire.

The film makes great points about vanity, about how ageing is obviously far tougher on women than it is on men (for all the advances made in recent years, women are still judged on looks more than men - and men more on status than women), and how the entertainment business can be shallow and cruel. While being a wonderful piece of entertainment in itself. During a few scenes, the particularly squeamish ones, I had to watch through my fingers but, despite that, I couldn't look away from the screen for one moment. A wonderful and peculiar piece of film making although I won't be signing for the process any time soon. Better to grow old with dignity than fight an unwinnable battle against time.

Fleapit revisited:Threads.

On the 23rd September 1984 I had not long left school, I had turned sixteen less than a month earlier, and, that evening, the BBC showed a film that almost everyone who saw would never ever forget. Threads. It as a time when fear of nuclear conflict was extremely heightened. It was an era of Two Tribes, Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, and I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me.

Yes, the fear of nuclear war infiltrated pop culture so deeply that even an artist as innocuous as Nik Kershaw got involved. During the eighties (the mid-eighties, especially) the threat of nuclear war, of mutually assured destruction, seemed all too possible. A year previously, the American film The Day After had been screened in Britain and, for the most part, it failed to convey the full horror of what nuclear war would be like. Threads did not make that mistake.

Threads (written by Barry Hines who'd written the screenplay for Ken Loach's Kes back in 1969, and directed by Mick Jackson who went on to make the Hollywood blockbusters L.A. Story and The Bodyguard) had a very big effect on me and my friends and we've spoke of it for years but I've not had a chance to watch it again for over forty years. Until this week that is when it was shown on BBC4. It's still up on iPlayer for a few more weeks.

Has it stood the test of time? Spoiler alert. Yes. It is still just as good/bad as it ever was and, most depressingly of all, it is still relevant. With a deranged lunatic like Trump close to regaining power, it is perhaps more relevant than it has been since the 1980s. What a world to live in.

What is unusual, but highly effective, about Threads is that it starts off almost like a soap opera (a technique that Russell T Davies and others would employ decades later for shows like Years and Years). Young Jimmy Kemp (a pre-Home to Roost Reece Dinsdale) and Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) are young lovers. They listen to Chuck Berry and make out in Jimmy's Ford Corsair on a hill overlooking their home city of Sheffield.

When Ruth falls pregnant, unplanned, they expedite their plans to marry and both families, though worrying about their relatively young ages, are supportive as Jimmy and Ruth look for flats and look forward to marriage and parenthood in an easily recognisable world of milk floats, paper rounds, football scores on the radio, handheld video games, pints of beer in smoky pubs, Airfix kits, Rubik's Cubes, and, of course, lots and lots of cups of tea. This is Britain.

Yet in the background, television (featuring ex-Blue Peter presenter Lesley Judd) and radio news reports of an escalating civil war in Iran. Soviet convoys descend on the country, US warships appears in the Gulf of Oman, and American paratroopers land in Isfahan. We hear the voice of then president Ronald Reagen chillingly warning the Soviets that they're taking the world to "the brink of an armed confrontation with incalculable consequences for all mankind". Narrator Paul Vaughan occasionally explains to us, matter of factly, the logistics of everything.

Then shit, as they say, gets real. Britain gets involved, the government takes control of British Airways and all channel ferries, troops are sent to Europe, and the Royal Navy are deployed to protect the North Sea oil rigs. On top of this there passionate CND marches, equally fervent counter-protests, panic buying, and, eventually, looting of shops. 

Further escalation happens apace. Conventional weapon attacks are followed by the first (unseen) nuclear attack by the US on a Soviet base. The art gallery in Sheffield takes its paintings down to protect them from being damaged or destroyed, tailbacks form as people try to escape the city, TUC officials call for a strike, and stern voiced and dispassionate advice on how to prepare for, and react to, a nuclear strike are broadcast on the radio. All trifling and useless in the face of such impending disaster.

"You are better off at home - stay there" is one of the least disturbing pieces of advice given by the Scarfolk like authorities. Others advise on how to bury your dead and how to build an "inner refuge", and there's advice about what to do about deadly nuclear fallout. Nothing, basically. There's nothing you can do.

Then, shockingly - even though it's been signposted for the best part of an hour, the bomb hits. A huge mushroom cloud rises in the sky above Sheffield as, on the ground, absolute chaos is loosed upon the city. The casualties of the blast (and others believed to have gone off around Britain) are estimated at between 2,500,000 and 9,000,000. Yet, nothing speaks as loudly as the scene of a woman involuntarily urinating down her trouser leg.

Another equally iconic moment comes with the scene of the melting milk bottle but it's not just the milk bottles that melt. People do too. Both Jimmy and his younger brother Michael (Nicholas Lane) are killed instantly (we don't even see what happens to Jimmy but we know he's dead, he's in an area where there are no survivors). Sheffield is destroyed - and so is most of the rest of Britain.

But that's not the end. Far from it. Where Threads was particularly strong, as I recalled, was that it continued to show the affects of a nuclear bomb long after (for over a decade) after the bomb itself had fallen. First the fallout, the lethal radioactive dust, the radiation sickness, the panic. A post-nuclear bomb Britain, you'll not be surprised, is not a pretty place.

Dead bodies strewn across the rubble filled streets, ruined buildings, shivering bandaged wrecks (including the traffic warden who terrified kids from the cover of that week's Radio Times), darkness, coldness, horrendous makeshift medical procedures performed without anaesthetic or even water, mass homelessness, potential starvation, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, ten to twenty million unburied human corpses lying in the street (in the UK alone, we have to imagine this doomsday scenario is repeated globally) and through at all Ruth is still pregnant.

When Ruth finally has her baby, Threads still has some unpleasant surprises left for us. One would imagine that defenders of what they would call a 'nuclear deterrent' would have seen Threads as a piece of leftist, peacenik, propaganda at the time and, in some ways, they're right, it is. But that's because it has to be. Nobody can ever win a nuclear war. You can only lose. Everybody loses. Threads was not shy in making that point and making it abundantly, and brutally, clearly.

There's a sense of impending doom from almost the very beginning but from the moment the bomb lands on Sheffield, the screaming, the sheer disbelief that "they've done it", everything is rendered incredibly powerfully and, it seems to me - someone who has quite clearly never lived through a nuclear blast, very realistically. 

Threads does not shy away from showing people in acute pain, people falling over dead in fields that resemble the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, and people undergoing severe distress. One of the most powerful scenes, and one I remembered most clearly, comes right near the end of the film when we see a barn full of wretches watching a beaten up old television showing footage of the old children's show Words and Pictures. It's an episode about "skeletons and skulls" and features a voice over asking people to identify a "cat's skeleton". Then it cuts to Ruth's unnamed child who is giving birth to a rape baby in another barn as a crazed, yet chained, alsatian barks wildly at her. Her face freezes in fear and the credits begin to roll. In complete silence. There's no more music. There's no words left need saying.

A Colour So Cruel:Blue Lights S2.

"The worse it gets, the better" - Lee Thompson

The second series of Blue Lights (BBC1/iPlayer, created by Declan Lawn, Adam Patterson, and Louise Gallagher and directed by Lawn, Patterson, and Jack Casey) is tense, moving - at times, and brutal but there are times it tends to drag on a teeny weeny bit. Times it's a bit 'same old, same old'. Perhaps that's what it feels like if you're a response police office on patrol in Belfast. Everything changes. Everything stays the same.

It's one year on from the end of series one and Stevie (Martin McCann) and Grace (Sian Brooke) are dealing with drug overdoses, Tommy (Nathan Braniff) and Annie (Katherine Devlin) are dealing with small time burglars - and drugs too. 

There's a lot of drugs being pumped into Belfast so new recruit Shane Bradley (Frank Blake) is drafted in to help deal with the drug fuelled crimewave. As is the overbearing and rude DS Murray Canning (Desmond Eastwood, relishing the unpleasant role) who has arrived from the Paramilitary Crime Task Force and has plans for Shane way above the response unit. Canning's been brought in to oversee Helen McNulty's (Joanne Crawford) section and McNulty is none too pleased about that.

Canning does a very good job of making himself unpopular and Shane Bradley is unlikely to win any personality contests either - although his gigachad looks and supreme confidence stand him in good stead at least to begin with. Jen Robinson (Hannah McClean) - the copper who preferred desk work to getting her hands dirty - has become a solicitor. That won't keep her out of the story.

But out on the streets, they call it murder. A loyalist feud has erupted between the equally unpleasant Jim 'Dixie' Dixon (Chris Corrigan) and Davey Hamill (Tony Flynn) and finding themselves caught up in the middle of this feud is Lee Thompson (Seamus O'Hara) and his sister Mags (Seana Kerslake). Thompson runs a loyalist pub and is being forced to pay protection money to Dixie. That's not something he's very happy about so he decides to do something about it.

Sure enough, it's not long before fires are started, Orangemen and marching bands appear, ghosts from the past return, and skeletons come out of their cupboards. In Blue Lights, the spectre of the troubles still lingers in the air and we get to see not only how it affects our generation but how it may go on to affect, even poison, many generations to come.

Treble whiskies are downed, Combat 18/swastika tattoos are revealed, random scallies appear and disappear again fairly quickly, there are redacted files aplenty, an investigation into a historic burning down of a chip shop, and there's even a brief consideration of things that happened in the Afghan poppy fields during the most recent war there.

There's some biting commentary about the state of the UK towards the end of fourteen years of Tory rule, there's lots of evocative shots of Belfast (the Harland & Wolff shipyard probably should be credited as an actor in the show), and there's a decent soundtrack with contributions from Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Sinead O'Connor, Jackson C.Frank, and someone called iiola doing a rather impressive Bonnie Raitt cover.

It's sillier than the first season (less copaganda, more what can we now to shock people - like when Eastenders and Brookside decided to start bringing in gangsters, at one point I was even reminded of Rob Reiner's 1992 film A Few Good Men) and there are probably a few too many strands to the story (it's hard to see how they'll all tie up in the end or if they even will) but some of them are great. Perhaps the best, for me, is the story of Lee and Mags with O'Hara putting in such an excellent, tortured, performance that it reminded me of Matias Varela's Jorge Salcedo Cabrera in the third series of Narcos.

Stevie and Grace's relationship seems, initially, to revolve around them discussing their packed lunches but, as the series develops, you start to wonder if romance is on the cards and they're not the only two cops who find themselves in a will they/won't they type scenario. Which breaks up the tension (admittedly with what's just another kind of tension) and adds a further soap opera element to the second series of Blue Lights.

Where it works best of all is when it touches on the way that social media can spread dangerous lies very very quickly and the real life outcomes of that and there's a very well handled side story about a man, Chris (Chris Robinson), who may have assisted his terminally ill husband in taking his own life. That's handled brilliantly as is the story of young Henry (Alfie Lawless), Lee's nephew, who idolises his uncle and wants to be just like him. Something that looks like ending up in very shocking, and upsetting, circumstances.

Perhaps, the overall theme of the series (all the action and on/off romance aside) is how police officers find themselves conflicted and tormented by the situations they find themselves in and the morality issues they have to navigate. Poor, innocent, Tommy who is just looking for love becomes the reluctant poster boy for that and in the last episode - one which made the whole series worthwhile - the viewers, like the characters, are forced to ponder how important, yet difficult, the act of forgiveness is. Without forgiveness, we are stuck forever in an endless loop of reprisal, hate, and death. Somebody needs to break the cycle. 

The Colour Of Music:Van Gogh at the National Gallery.

"In a painting I'd like to say something consoling, like a piece of music" - Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo

 

The Yellow House (The Street) (1888)

It's the colour that struck me the most, so vivid, so powerful, so expressive that some of the paintings almost seem to move as you look at them. In that it would seem that Vincent van Gogh's desire to create paintings that consoled like music does was a desire he met. Even if he struggled to find consolation in his life.

But these paintings don't just console, they fascinate, they excite, they move the viewer. I was, along with several hundred others, spending a Monday afternoon at The National Gallery's Van Gogh:Poets and Lovers exhibition, an exhibition that has received rave reviews all round and, spoiler alert, will receive another one. If you love Van Gogh, if you love painting, you will surely love this show.

 

The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Millet) (1988)

 

Astoundingly, it is first time the National have ever devoted an exhibition to Van Gogh (it's part of their centennial celebrations, and it also marks one hundred years since they bought Sunflowers and Van Gogh's Chair - both of which we'll get to).

 

A small first room contains a portrait of Van Gogh's friend Lieutenant Millet (whom the painter was jealous of because had success with women, unlike Van Gogh it seems) and a fairly ordinary public garden in Arles that's brought to life by Van Gogh's expressive brushwork. As well as another portrait, that of Eugene Boch, a poet whose narrow face reminded the artist of Dante. The deep blue sky, on what looks like a starry, starry night, is intended to show a man "who dreams great dreams". Van Gogh was big on his symbolism.

 

 

The Poet's Garden (Public Garden in Arles) (1888)

 

The Poet (Portrait of Eugene Boch) (1888)

 

Entrance to the Public Garden in Arles (1888)

 

Undergrowth (1889)

 

On painting the public gardens of Arles, Van Gogh wrote to his brother:- "sometimes in passing I find such beautiful things that in the end you have to try to do them anyway". Even the undergrowth of the neglected garden at the hospital in Saint-Remy, which he'd admitted himself to in 1889 after a series of mental breakdowns, became a fascination for him. 

Perhaps he saw something that reminded him of the state of his own brain but, no, let's not go there. Enough people have tried to interpret Van Gogh's art through the prism of his mental health. Could it be that he would have been a great artist anyway and that his mental health issues were hindering him in creating, rather than helping?

 

The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Remy (1889)

 

Flowering Shrubs (1889)

 

The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy (1889)

 

Hospital at Saint-Remy (1889)

 

The show changes up a gear with The Park of the Hospital at Saint-Remy and then one more with Hospital at Saint-Remy. These works are superb. So full of colour and movement, a feast for the eyes and mind-bogglingly advanced for the era in which they were made. Van Gogh saw the chopped pine tree in the first of the two as a "dark giant - like a proud man brought low" and hoped, with both works, to capture something of the anxiety of the patients at Saint-Remy.

 

Yet, at the same time, he was making quieter, more melancholic, works like Iris or the pen and ink Weeping Tree. Then, of course, there's the far more famous Van Gogh's chair, a portrait of an artist in absentia. Painted in Arles' Yellow House which he used as a studio and painted at a time when Paul Gauguin had come to visit him. There's a version somewhere with Gauguin sat in the chair but Van Gogh, it seems, would prefer to let his pipe, his tobacco, and, most of all, his chair stand as a surrogate for him. It remains as iconic now as ever.

 

Iris (1890)

 

Weeping Tree (1889)

 

Van Gogh's Chair (1888)

 

Starry Night over the Rhone (1888)

 

But not as iconic, surely, as Starry Night over the Rhone. It's a painting pretty much everyone knows and most people adore. Don McLean started his song Vincent by singing about it. But when you see it in situ it is quite outstanding. It's usually at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris but I was lucky enough to see it back in 2019 when it came over for a Tate Britain show. I don't remember it having quite such a powerful effect last time. This time, I walked in to the room it was in, the best room of a show in which there are no bad rooms, and it just hit me.

I love nocturnes anyway and, along with Whistler's, this is probably as good as they get. The lights of the city, the reflection of the lights on the ripples of the river, the couple in the fore of the painting. It all adds up to an almost overwhelming sense of awe and yet melancholia at the same time. And it's in a room with the incredible Yellow House (at the head of this blog) and the symbolist looking The Sower. It's a room in which you hardly know where to look. The enormous golden sun, like the Yellow House, seemed to glare as if lit from behind. How can a painter do that? Why weren't people at the time blown away?

The Sower (1888)

 

The Bedroom (1889)

 

Self-Portrait (1889)

 

The Alyscamps (1888)

 

The hits keep coming with The Bedroom, a masterly Self-Portrait, and a less frantic than many work in The Alyscamps. Yellow autumn trees (cypresses) flank two lovers as they walk away from the industrial buildings behind them into a more romantic past - or more romantic future.

 

There's a room devoted to pen and ink works that Van Gogh made in and around the grounds of the ruined 12th century Montmajour Abbey and though they, quite obviously, lack the colour of Van Gogh's greatest work it gives us an insight into the mind of the man who made them and the way he worked up a picture. He didn't just make them up. He thought about them. He worked hard on them. 

 

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888)

 

View of La Crau from Montmajour (1888)

 

The Stevedores (1888)

 

View of Arles (1889)

 

The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Remy) (1888)

 

The Stevedores is just beautiful, again it's the colour and the way Van Gogh works with light. Van Gogh said when he saw the scene that inspired this in real life it was "pure Hokusai". There are trees, both in View of Arles and The Large Plane Trees, that seem to refuse to be held in by the edges of the canvas. Van Gogh, it seemed, was not just so much an admirer of a nature but a man who saw him as part of it. 

 

Patience Escalier, an old gardener that Van Gogh had met in Arles was not really a peasant but it's telling to see the dignity that Van Gogh gave to a humble gardener and would, surely, also have given to an actual peasant. The use of colour is electrifying. However, most people were not giving it all that much attention because nearby was the big set piece, the big selling point - if one was needed and with Van Gogh one is certainly not needed - of the show. 

 

Van Gogh had always intended for his two Sunflowers paintings (one owned by the National, one usually on show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) to hang either side of his La Berceuse (normally found to be hanging in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts). Considering he is said to have only sold one painting in his lifetime that's pretty bold of him but he's finally got his dream because here, in London, all three of them hang together just as the master intended. Cameras out!

 

Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) (1888)

 

Sunflowers (1888)

 

La Berceuse (The Lullaby) (1889)

 

Sunflowers (1889)

 

The first of the Sunflowers was hung in the guest bedroom of the Yellow House to welcome Gauguin to the 'artist's home' and although it's not specified where the second one was hung it seems that Van Gogh thought the three paintings together would look good hung on a ship and that the ensemble may bring comfort to a sailor returning home!

 

La Bercreuse features a favourite subject of Van Gogh's, Augustine Roulin, and is supposed to be an ideal depiction of motherhood. It's not my favourite work in the exhibition but in its flattened areas of colour it does seem to pre-empt Fauvist artists like Matisse and Derain who, of course, would go on to inspire the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Van Gogh as a forebear to Picasso? I'm sure I'm not the first to go there.

 

Still Life with Coffee Pot (1888)

 

Landscape with Ploughman (1889)

 

There's a Still Life with Coffee Pot which is as still as Morandi yet as lively as a Cezanne and then there's one final room full of landscapes and olive trees. Lots of olive trees. As I walked out through them I almost felt like one of Van Gogh's lovers (even though I was on my own) flanked by the beauty of the natural world.

Although it wasn't the natural world's beauty but the incredible work of one of art's greatest ever painters. What an amazing show and, one last thing you may not have noticed, all of these paintings were made in one single three year period. The last three years of Van Gogh's life Imagine what he could have gone on to do.

Landscape from Saint-Remy (Wheatfield behing Saint-Paul Hospital) (1889)

The Olive Trees (1889)

Olive Trees (1889)

 

Oliver Grove, Saint-Remy (1889)