Who is America? Who Will Survive in America?

"I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it's literally going to cease to exist." - Donald Trump.

The opening sequence of Sacha Boren Cohen's 'Who is America?' makes it immediately clear (as if there could ever be any doubt) who the arch satirist has in the cross hairs this time round. Not just the most moronic, and venal, president ever to disgrace the United States but the gun nuts, conspiracy theorists, racists, and women haters that make up both his base and his administration. Appropriately too, Baron Cohen also has a dig at some of Trump's weaker, self-righteous, foes. Those that would rather chant or argue about the minutiae of resistance than get on with the vital job of preventing the rise of fascism across the globe.

The main problem with trying to satirise something so unequivocally ridiculous in the first place is how do you manage to make it look more stupid than it so obviously already is? Tom Lehrer, famously, claimed satire died when Henry Kissinger won a Nobel peace prize but with the inauguration of Trump it seems like slapstick died. Hell, I'm holding him personally responsible for the death of Barry Chuckle.

Baron Cohen, as anyone familiar with Ali G, Borat, or Bruno will already know, simply goes larger. The characters he's invented for Who is America? are utterly ludicrous, they don't seem like real people at all but grotesque caricatures that prey on extant prejudices like a mosquito sucks the blood of a starving child. These are American sized fools. Tremendous. Tremendous fools. Bigly.

There are six of them and some, it has to be said, work better than others. I'm gonna build up from the ones I think are the least successful to the ones that work best. They are, though, all equally daft. Dr Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr is a mobilty scooter driving, brown leather jacket wearing, conspiracy theorist with a shockingly poor grip of both maths and facts. But he's good with the alternative facts. He claims Trump is "the least vain person in the world" (just ask anyone at Trump Tower, Trump Casino, Trump University, they'll tell you "it's never about him), he thinks the American Cancer Society is a liberal organisation that raises money to give Americans cancer, he calls CNN the Communist News Network, and he blames Bob Marley for the invasion of Iraq. He also claims the CIA are 'weaponising weather to bring about global warming, which he calls 'climax change', using helicopters with whisks attached to them. To his credit Bernie Sanders can barely suppress his incredulousness with Ruddick Jr's, intentional, bullshit but this is a pretty broad brush to be painting with.

But then they all are. OMGWhizzBoyOMG is a Finnish children's entertainer who talks like the Swedish chef from the Muppets. His silly accent, his brightly coloured shirts and dungarees, and his shock of orange hair seem to invite his guests to prostate themselves in front of him and reveal their own prejudices surprisingly easily. While unboxing 'shopkins' with former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio (who defends gun ownership to a toy donut) they discuss 'hand jobs' and 'golden showers'. A former sheriff from Wisconsin, David Clarke, (who tells a toy donut not to join Antifa) defends fascists and says he'd have done the same thing in 1930s Germany. Clarke insists it's wrong to take sides. Either now or in 1930s Germany and Arpaio tells OMGWhizzBoyOMG he thinks like Trump. He doesn't though. He's much brighter.

You'll get the idea, correctly, that this show has two main aims. To skewer the rise of American fascism and to make jokes so puerile your average teenage boy would consider them a denigration of the language of Shakespeare. It does it bloody brilliantly though. Milanese fashion photographer, and silver haired playboy, Gio Monaldo being a case in question.

Monaldo, whilst being wanked off and fellated by his much younger girlfriend beneath a rug, tries to buy a yacht for Bashar al-Assad and asks about furnishing it with military hardware, smuggling women (or 'merchandise') on to it to sexually appease al-Assad and his goons, and if it would be possible to murder approximately fifty Syrian refugees using poisoned water. As his 'partner' masturbates him with one hand and idly texts with the other he finds, with apparent glee, that the executive from the yacht company is more than happy to comply with all his demands. Even an interview with OJ Simpson in which Monaldo continually jokes about the ease of killing women who irritate him somehow doesn't result in Baron Cohen losing his cool. How he does it, I do not know!

Rick Sherman is a lisping cockney ex-con with a swallow tattoo in a neck brace trying to make good in the straight world after release from prison. He's aiming for careers in art, music, and haute cuisine and, predictably, his take on all these forms is more than a little crude. As an artist his medium is spunk and shit and he gets a young lady gallery owner to clip a few pubes off her bush for his brush. She unblushingly talks about "oxymoronic paradoxical juxtapositions".

In another episode (there are seven in total) he makes electronic dance music from the sounds of people pissing, puking, and buggering each other which somehow involves him being rapturously received during a DJ set in a high end Florida nightclub. His forays into the world of the chef sees him presenting an esteemed food writer with a prison themed meal that begins with a 'medley' of beans on toast followed by veal smuggled into jail by a man who's secreted it up his bum wrapped in a johnny. 'Anally aged', Sherman calls it. If that sounds unappetising don't worry, it's a strawberry flavoured condom to give it a 'summery feel'.

His final dish is cut from the loin of a dead criminal from Lewisham. "Human but ethical" Sherman reassures his guest who not only happily eats it but also claims it to be one of the greatest taste sensations of his life. He's equally vocal about the wonderful flavours of a "fillet of vegetarian fed Chinese dissident with cauliflower puree".

The two best characters are Erran Morrad and Nira Cain-N'degeocello. From opposite ends of the spectrum. Let's take the well meaning, but utterly clueless and empathy lacking, liberal first and save the right wing psychopath until last. Nira, bald, with a paunch, is a self-hating dogooder who cycles around smalltown America hoping to "heal the divide". He apologises for being white, he apologises for identifying as heterosexual, he lives in a yurt with his wife Naomi and his children Harvey Milk and Malala, and he believes the world's most dangerous chemical weapon is testosterone.

He tells Trump delegates at a conference in South Carolina that his wife has had sex with a porpoise but not until he's tried to get them involved in a 'first people's chant'. Then he tells a selection of small town Arizonans he's a representative of both the Clinton Foundation and the Saudi Arabian government and he's there to promote, announce even, the construction of the world's largest mosque outside the Middle East that will make their town a worldwide hub for Islamic tourism. One local boasts loudly of being a racist although there is a more moderate voice from the guy who says they 'tolerate' black people.

Obviously Nira/Baron Cohen laps all this up. He proposes menstrual flag programmes, campaigns for equality for all twenty-four genders, asks a black man if he identifies as white, and asks a white man "how would you feel if your daughter had a black pimp"? This goes down about as well as the time he tells his guest he's reclaimed the word 'paedophile' to mean someone who simply loves children. Nira Cain is a 'proud paedophile' and introduces us to his new book 'Flopsy Finds A Funny Picture' in which Flopsy and her rabbit friends appear in scenes such as "What are Mummy and Daddy Rabbit doing?" and bunnies fellate and masturbate each other to feed their $50 a day carrot habbits. There's even a cartoon bunny bukakke party. What more could you ask for?

 

I GLAGged willingly at that one but some of the other jokes fell a bit flat. When Nira Cain wears an 'empathy belly' to simulate his partner's regretted pregnancy it all gets a bit too silly. Cain offers to anally insert a child/doll so he can 'give birth' to it and the nurse brings out a canister of WD40 to ease passage from his, hopefully, fake anus. The vision of a baby's head lodged up a liberal's arse is one that will probably stay with me for longer than I'd like it to.

Erran Morrad is an Israeli counter-terrorism expert whose rank changes each episode from Sergeant to Colonel to Brigadier and so on. He looks like an Action Man and marches around with a walk that would have been dismissed by the Ministry of Silly Walks as a bit too much. He wants to arm not just teachers but school children as well. An interview with gun enthusiast, "guns are fun", Philip van Cleave (a man so morally bankrupt that in an interview with Piers Morgan he still looked like the biggest twat) laughs as Morrad blames school shootings on liberals and suggests that as toddlers haven't yet developed a conscience they make very effective killers. 'Kinderguardians' he calls them, and he's invented a range of 'gunimals' so they can transform their toys into highly evolved killing machines in a matter of seconds.

Morrad's guns/toys include the likes of Puppy Pistol, Gunny Rabbit, Uzicorn, Dino-Gun, and BFF (Best Firearm Forever). He's made an instruction video of how to stop 'naughty men' and 'have them take a long nap'. Larry Platt of the American Civil Rights Movement asserts his belief that schools are brainwashing kids into believing that guns are responsible for shooting and that the ant-gun lobby have blood on their hands. Warming to his theme he proposes the idea that Muslims should pray in secret or risk being shot dead and laughs heartily when Morrad says "it's not rape if it's your wife".

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, to his credit, won't support some of Morrad's crazier ideas but Trent Lott, the former Mississippi senator, and other notable Republican figures go on to both endorse Morrad's murderous plans and rage vehemently against the 'evils' of homosexuality and mental illness. Jason Spencer's contribution to the show was so vile he had to resign after it (so satire can work, Lehrer, even in the most troubling of times). The former member of the Georgia House of Representatives and noted anti-burka campaigner agreed to identify a terrorist hiding beneath a burka using an upskirt selfie. Morrad warned him many of these terrorists keep a Glock near their cock.

As Spencer angrily shouts the word 'nigger' over and over again, you get the impression Baron Cohen knows he's doing this racist piece of shit out of a job and he relishes it. Correctly. Spencer's attempts to use Chinese words is nearly as offensive. Ho Chi Minh City, konnichiwa, and sushi aren't even Chinese! He's told to use his buttocks to intimidate perceived ISIS terror threats which he does by pulling his trousers down, pushing his naked bum to the fore, and shouting USA repeatedly! That'll learn 'em.

When Morrad interviews George W Bush's vice president Dick Cheney he calls him "one of the world's greatest humanitarians" and asks him what was the favourite war of the ones he started. Afghanistan? Iraq 1? Iraq 2? Cheney freely admits to "enjoying" war, he doesn't deny killing 100,000 terrrorists and 700,000 'potential' terrorists, and Baron Cohen can't resist the temptation to make a few Dick'n'Bush jokes before Cheney autographs Morrad's waterboard and spells Dan Quayle's name wrong.

Morrad also pretends to be a Muslim called Abdul (identifiable as such by eating hummus and charming snakes), puts babies in 'suicide diapers', and claims to have survived two beheadings. He gets some gun nut to bite his prosthetic penis, calls the Women's March in San Francsisco "the world's most dangerous terrorist gathering", and asserts with some authority that "37% of lesbians look like Charlie Chaplin". It's sometimes hard to believe any of this could possibly be a set up. Are these people really that stupid? That gullible? That lacking in moral fibre?

It seems so. In one of the most jaw dropping scenes of the whole series he gathers a group of patriots and asks them what they think a quinceanera is. They see the Mexican tradition of having a party for a girl's 15th birthday, and her arrival into womanhood, as a barely concealed front so that Mexican men can drug and rape children.

Luckily, Morrad's got some 'pussy panties' with him. "Close your eyes, touch my pussy panties" he instructs the assembled knuckleheads who all oblige, rubbing Baron Cohen's tracksuited dick covered by a pair of knickers with a fake vagina stitched into them. "It's a little dry but I get the idea" is the assessment of one fondler. So they can further thwart these Mexican rapists they cover their faces in KY jelly, put condoms on their fists, and add Rohypnol to the guacamole. Ain't no party like a mocked up Mexican child rape party.

"I'll blow your Mexican balls off" shouts one of the jerks just before the Feds rock up to find Morrad/Baron Cohen in a mariachi outfit with a unconvincing fake 'tache peeling off and a man wearing a fake vagina and filling the dips with date rape drugs.  

So it's a funny show. Some jokes, like the ones about being anally raped, fall a bit flat but its coarseness and its very blunt edge are the trademarks of Baron Cohen and it's what he does best. At times, with the references to Blink 182, Rita Ora, Whiz Khalifa, and Cardi B, it's a bit like Brass Eye for people with a shorter attention span, most of us now, but if it never quite hits the heights of that wonderful show it does give you a LOL, a ROFL, and a WTF every couple of minutes.

It's pertinent too. Former Alabama Republican nominee, accused of sexually assaulting under age girls, agrees that that the state of Alabama has long been famed for its equality and in opposing people like Moore, van Cleave, and Cheney and in helping to get James Spencer removed from public office the show has achieved, even surpassed, its intentions. His subjects confess that they fear America will, in Trump's words, become a 'shithole' if they get rid of fascists, to assert that they believe the #metoo movement's aims are to take over the world and kill all men, to believe they're murdering liberals and women to prevent terrorism, and even to penetrate a showroom dummy of Trump himself.

It's ugly but so is Trump and what he's doing to the world. But it's no longer weird. Not in a world where the POTUS has the IQ of an amoeba, the empathy of a sponge, and the cock of the mushroom character from Super Mario. 

This is played for laughs. The real world is, er, real. Each show begins with quotes by JFK, FDR, and Ronald Reagan followed by one of Trump mocking a disabled person by doing what we Brits of a certain age call a 'Joey'. Reminding us just how far America, and the world, has fallen.

We're all fucked.

Screens, screams, and celluloid dreams:Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema.

"Some people say that I talk too fast, but I think it's just that they listen too slowly" - Mark Kermode.

I used to wonder why Mark Kermode wasn't on television more. Was he hideously ugly? Did he have 'a face for radio'? Or did he just prefer radio? He's on telly more now and it turns out he's perfectly acceptable looking, he may not have the looks of some of the matinee idols whose films he can be quite, correctly, cruel about but he's a natty dresser and he's not let himself go like many men in their fifties. A pitfall this author is beginning to negotiate himself. The jury is out on that for now.

He still seems to prefer the medium of radio, his Friday afternoon film reviews with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 Live are great and you can even watch them on YouTube clips, but when he does make one of his occasional appearances on TV it's usually worth tuning in.

One such occasion was BBC4's recent Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema, a five parter that took apart various long established and accepted film genres and looked at the nuts and bolts they're built with, how they worked. The fact that Kermode's name was in the title of the show proves him to be a major selling point and judging by the set (all the cliched things that make up a movie man's lot:- directors' chairs, spools of tape, and overly powerful lights) it seems safe to assume that his fee was, the multiple film clips aside, probably the biggest outlay that the programme makers had.

I speculate wildly, of course. I've no idea how much they paid him but he was probably worth it. He's good, he is, Kermode. He knows his onions and, more importantly for us, he knows his cinema history. Which is just as well as films about onions, or even featuring onions in any major role, are few and far between.

Each episode is built around a similar, and pretty straightforward, format. Kermode looks at the separate parts of the film and shows how films in each particular genre have been historically constructed, how these methods have developed or been twisted, and then we get to see lots of lovely clips of some of our favourite films, some less impressive films, and many films that we've never got round to seeing. Even a few we've never heard of.

So in episode one, devoted to the romcom, we hear how boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again - the end. All romcoms are built on that very basic structure or some kind of variation of it. Sometimes boy meets boy, sometimes girl meets girl, sometimes boy/girl meets fish as clips from The Shape of Water prove.

We're also treated to excerpts of 500 Days of Summer, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, The Big Sick, The Philadelphia Story, You've Got Mail, Letter to Brezhnev, The Gold Rush, and Splash which Kermode rates as an all time favourite. When Harry Met Sally, too, is eulogized about and the quote from that film's writer Nora Ephron, "destiny is something we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything happens is accidental", says a lot about our attraction to the romcom.

We want to believe that life is romantic and we want to believe that all the pain and heartbreak we suffer will be rewarded in the end. It's rarely true in life. That's why we stare at the silver screen. To be transported. It's a form of a magical realism in that people who don't look too different to us, perhaps they have better teeth and more expensive dresses, and who don't lead lives too different than ours somehow manage to eventually succeed in their romantic endeavours as long as they're kind, as long as they're brave. We only need to look at the President of the United States of America to know that, in reality, we live in a world where wilfully ignorant and cruel bastards tend to win.

Often romcoms will reference earlier romantic comedies, they'll regularly feature the cast breaking into song and dance routines (La La Land, Grease (which didn't feature - why?), Bollywood films, Fred'n'Ginger in Top Hat), there may be a 'meet-cute' (When Harry Met Sally's an example but we've got our own personal ones, I have anyway), and often the female side of the equation will be represented by the 'manic pixie dream girl' (Annie Hall, Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve). A gay best friend is another popular trope to the extent that, in 2003, Darren Stein even made a movie called G.B.F. (Gay Best Friend).

These days gay people are even 'allowed' to fall in love themselves in the movies. But the rules don't change for them. There still has to be an 'obstacle' to love. These 'complications' can come in the form of parents or already existing, and always unsuitable, partners. Bill Pullman (Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping) was, in the nineties, that master of being jilted for more exciting men. Other times the unsuitable partner is worse than boring. They're abusive, violent, or inattentive.

But, of course, the biggest obstacle to true love is, always, ourselves. Our selfishness, our fear of commitment. I'm not embarrassed to admit that I've shunned the cynical attitude I used to protect me from hurt in my twenties and early thirties and can now enjoy the romance as much as the comedy in a romcom. Hell, even watching this Kristin Scott Thomas's scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral got me. The characters in Richard Curtis films may not be able to swear properly (have you ever actually heard anyone say "fuck-a-doodle-doo"?) but he is something of a master of the romcom. I watched Love Actually on a plane once and I'm blaming the altitude for my heightened emotional state but I actually found myself welling up during the rare moments I wasn't ogling Martine McCutcheon.

Later in life, Kermode suggests, reasonably if a little depressingly, love and sex are seen as ways to 'escape', or at least temporarily delay, the spectre of death. There's a dark side to some romcoms which you probably won't see in How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Bridget Jones's Diary, or Pretty Woman. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character has to reach rock bottom, he even has to die several times, before he finally learns to live correctly, fulfil his potential, and win the heart of Andie MacDowell.

Elsewhere, elements of the romcom slip into films from other genres. Films like The Fly, The Phantom Thread, Punch-Drunk Love, Superman, Spiderman, and Black Panther, and even, and I'm really sad not to have seen this one, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.

How many times must I have dreamed of rushing across Waterloo Bridge in the rain as the realisation hits me that I'm just about to lose the love of my life only to find her, him (or it), running in the same direction. We meet in a passionate embrace as a boat passes silently below and the legend THE END comes up on the screen, the curtains close, and the lights come on revealing the cinema to be a large room of plush red flipback chairs cheapened by umpteen containers of half eaten popcorn.

That's why you should never let light in on magic. If, at my advancing age, a romantic clinch on Waterloo Bridge is starting to look increasingly unlikely then the likelihood of being called up to take part in a heist is being quoted at even longer odds. Even if my current, mildly penurious, circumstances would mean I'd certainly be tempted.

The heist movie is the theme of the second episode and we're treated to clips of The Asphalt Jungle, Dead Presidents, The League of Gentlemen, Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Eight, Reservoir Dogs, Rififi, Sexy Beast, Quick Change, Bound, Angel Face, Set It Off, Inception, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Point Break. A selection of films of varying artistic merit that's for sure.

To make a heist film you'll need a hand picked bunch of specialist crooks (a criminal mastermind to oversee the job, a rich financier to pay for it, a getaway driver, and a resident psycho/hooligan/thug), you'll need some kind of invisible alarm system that will need fooling/bypassing, and you'll need, and this doesn't seem to have changed with the advent of computers, a big ol' flipchart or blackboard placed in some kind of disused warehouse where the gang can sit around as the plan is revealed to them and the exposition is laid out to the audience. Ideally, too, there'll be a car chase (Baby Driver, The Italian Job).

Obviously, something has to go wrong. The job can never go quite to plan, often the fault of the resident psycho who ends up losing it with his own team members, and, eventually, the final section of the film will see each member of the gang individually tracked down, arrested, or more satisfyingly for the bloodthirsty viewer, killed. Normally in some reasonably imaginative way. An alternative is the cliffhanger ending, quite literally in the case of The Italian Job.

The only strong female characters will be either femme fatales (Pulp Fiction) or molls (Double Indemnity) and that's no surprise when you consider that gangs are essentially businesses run for men by men and in many cases no more or less criminal and amoral in their behaviour than legally recognised businesses.

Along with excerpts from Adaptation, Heat, The Wrong Trousers, Dog Day Afternoon, ad The Great Train Robbery I learned that the Wachowski Brothers are now the Wachowski Sisters (not sure how I missed that particular memo) and was introduced to the rather fascinating looking low budget Glaswegian film That Sinking Feeling from 1979. Directed by Bill Forsyth it featured John Gordon Sinclair and Robert Buchanan as bored teenagers planning to make it rich stealing stainless steel sinks from a warehouse. It makes the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh look like Titanic!

Unlike the romcom episode, I was able to negotiate these heists without getting 'something in my eye'. The coming of age films that made up part three looked to be a lot trickier. Call Me By Your Name, alone, is test enough but so are Kes, Moonlight, Lady Bird, This is England, and Stand By Me.

I'm pretty sure I got through Persepolis, Boyhood, Submarine, Gregory's Girl, Quadrophenia, Boyz n the Hood, The 400 Blows, Donnie Darko, Billy Elliott, The Virgin Suicides, and Carrie without blubbing and the only tears that flowed during the two interminably dull Harry Potter films I allowed myself to be subjected to were tears of boredom. For the shame I've not seen, or if I have I've forgotten, The Wild One, The Graduate, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Saturday Night Fever, American Honey, Ratcatcher, The Florida Project, Bend It Like Beckham, Rebel Without A Cause, American Graffiti, Fish Tank, Dead Poets Society, Girlhood, Clueless, Ginger Snaps, The Craft, Toy Story 3, Blue is the Warmest Colour, or Heathers. Even if I did learn, from this show, that the latter film bestowed upon the English language the sayings "jealous much" and "fuck me gently with a chainsaw".

With its themes of buddies, music, loss of innocence, and first love the coming of age movie can be the most personal of genres for both film makers and venues. There's always a metaphorical journey and, often, this is represented by an actual, physical, journey. These films are snapshots of youth and anyone who's looked back at old photos will know how nostalgic that feels. Imagine being able to make a whole film to celebrate, reflect upon, or say sorry for, your youthful indiscretions and mistakes. What with there not being a whole load of teenage film makers these films may wallow in nostalgia but isn't that a lovely feeling. Kind of a good sadness.

A popular trick, used in both Kes and This is England, is to use local non-actors to give the films a more realistic feel. Other tropes in this genre may include the use of surrogate parental figures (Moonlight) and makeover scenes (Grease - again, why not included?).

We're equally aware of the cliches of the science fiction film:- mad scientists, homicidal computers, time travel (to the future or the past), space travel, robot companions, and, now in the mainstream more than ever before, Afrofuturism. The fourth of Kermode's shows is dedicated to science fiction and we learn how these journeys into outer space are often intended to reflect more personal journeys into our own inner spaces, how they often serve as parables about the exploration of the human mind, and how, according to Mark Kermode, it all began with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In 1818 she not only unleashed a monster into the world but one that birthed a whole gallery of grotesques and a whole new genre. Huge amounts of films have been made in the science fiction genre and this show tries to show as many of them as possible, or so it seems. Planet of the Apes, Blade Runner, The Time Machine, Star Wars, Vertigo, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Twelve Monkeys, La Jetee, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Arrival, La Voyage de la Lune, Interplanetary Revolution, Aelita:Queen of Mars, Forbidden Planet, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Silent Running, Gravity, Solaris, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Mars Attacks, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Independence Day, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, District 9, The Brother From Another Planet, Her, Under The Skin, The War Game, Wall-E, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Robocop, Alphaville, Metropolis, Star Trek, Black Panther, and Sun Ra's Space is the Place are just a few of the films we get to enjoy scenes from in this episode.

Even less obviously, or patently not, sci-fi films like High Noon, Freaks and Taxi Driver get an airing. In retrospect this doesn't leave Kermode much time to flesh out his theories on science fiction film making but we hardly notice as we're caught up in the thrill of the films and our memories of watching them as younger versions of ourselves.

He does mention Alien being inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which makes a neat link into the fifth, final, and possibly most anticipated, show of the series. Horror. The genre closest to Mark Kermode's heart as anyone who's had the pleasure of hearing him pontificate about The Exorcist and his love for it will be able to testify.

Like the science-fiction show it's packed to the gunwales with clips so take a deep breath as I list them. There were scenes from The Exorcist (obvs), Psycho, The Blair Witch Project, Get Out, Angel Heart, Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, Dracula, The Wicker Man, The Evil Dead, Salem's Lot, Let the Right One In, Friday the 13th, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Suspiria, the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Paranormal Activity, Eraserhead, Cat People, Carrie, An American Werewolf in London, Jaws, Nosferatu, Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer, Eyes Without a Face, Poltergeist, Halloween, He Who Gets Slapped, It (introducing Pennywise), Unfriended, The Last House on the Left, Night of the Living Dead, The Witchfinder General, Aliens, The Spiral Staircase, Prevenge, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Cockneys vs Zombies. Some scared the shit out of me (Halloween, Angel Heart, and Don't Look Now which didn't feature 😢), others left me cold (Freddy Krueger always seemed more of an irritating prick than a genuinely terrifying creation), and some I'd not seen. Certainly The Orphanage, a 2007 Spanish horror directed by J.A.Bayona, looked absolutely brilliant and one for the must see list.

We were even treated to a clip of the 1973 public information film The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water which did a good job of giving kids of my generation nightmares for years to come. Another public information film at the time warning children about the perils of drowning featured that lovely Rolf Harris. At least children knew they could be safe with Rolf. Wakes up from a coma. Oops!

With Kim Newman on co-writing duties for this episode, and with gore being so close to Kermode's heart, we're guaranteed an excellent hour that takes us from H P Lovecraft to Hammer via the inspirations of Ed Gein, masks, clowns, jump scares, subliminal cuts, the amping up of suppressed fears from a whisper to a scream, and the slow build up of dread that film makers create by using a combination of sound effects and lighting, ramping up the tension to often almost unbearable levels.

We're left, it seems quite often, with, the admittedly slightly misogynistic trope, of 'the final girl'. Everyone else is dead except the killer and the girl and she walks alone in the dark as we look behind or under any trees, doors, or beds that may be around expecting something evil to appear very quickly and very menacingly. The fact we know it'll happen doesn't make it any less scary, quite the opposite, and the fact that I'd seen some of these terrifying moments time and again didn't lessen their impact watching them with Mark Kermode as my curatorial guide.

As with the four previous episodes it was the clips that made Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema worth watching. Them and Kermode's deconstruction of the cinematic genres we've come to take for granted. It was a simple idea and it was one that worked surprisingly well. It was certainly one that made my 'films to see list' grow exponentially longer.

Spiritualized:Born on a black day, shot through with starlight.

"Though I have a broken heart I'm too busy to be heartbroken, there's a lot of things that need to be done". - Broken Heart, Spiritualized.

Spiritualized were playing their only UK gig of 2018 at the Hammersmith Apollo and, lucky me, I'd been the grateful recipient of the generous birthday gift of a ticket to the show from my much loved friend Pam. Even better, she was accompanying me to the gig. There was no way it could be a bad night. It turned out to be a great one.

It was a nomimally sedentary event which would have horrified me back in my twenties but not now. Not if it's the right band. Spiritualized are the sort of band you're more than happy to sit down and watch. I read some attendees were unhappy about the constant flipping of the auditorium chairs as people popped out to the bars and bogs with increasing regularity but, hey, it may be a sit down affair but it's a rock'n'roll gig. It's not the theatre. Even when people got up to dance near the end it looked more like old footage of Woodstock than one of those dreadful 'An Audience With....' programmes in which self-conscious celebrities whooped and hollered in the aisles.

Not that there was any shortage of whooping-and-a-hollering in the room. From the very onset Spiritualized received a rapturous reception which is only to be expected if you kick your set off, following a very brief intro of Hold On from 2003's Amazing Grace, with the primal thrust of Come Together, the first of three tracks from the critically lauded masterpiece Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, now an astonishing twenty-one years old.

The set was bookended by two sets of, ostensibly, greatest hits with the meat in the sandwich being provided by their new album, And Nothing Hurt is their best for some time, played in its entirety. With seven members of the band, a ten piece gospel choir, and sizeable string and brass sections there were thirty people on stage from the very start to the very finish of the gig.

Sometimes the gospel choir dominated to the point we could almost be watching a tribute to the recently departed Aretha Franklin in a homely Tennessee Baptist church rather than a cavernous rock venue, other times you could revel in a ride back into rock'n'roll history as the band revelled in both reverently and irreverently ripping open the handbooks of both rock and drone, elsewhere there were plaintive keyboard refrains that felt almost as if they were going to usher in Pierce's old band mate Sonic Boom's more sprechgesang vocal stylings. At one point a key change was struck with such power that several members of the audience jumped from their seats with all the enthusiasm, and none of the choreography, of boy band members on a TV talent show. Westlife's boozy uncles!

The band have always honed their sound more than they've evolved it and, as such, that means that new and old songs meld together into a harmonious whole. A whole that is often greater than the sum of its parts. My friend Rob and I used to talk about 'sound' bands (bands that developed a specific sound like Loop) and 'song' bands (bands that wrote catchy tunes but had no over arching style (REM, Blur) but Spiritualized long ago ascended to the plane of bands, like My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain, who've got both the 'songs' and the 'sound'.

Stay With Me's like slipping into a big ol' bubblebath full of warm water, regret, and fond memories. So Long You Pretty Thing sounds like a close, and troubled, friend whispering dark secrets and bon mots into your ear after a late night of red wine and confessionals. Broken Heart is probably my favourite Spiritualized song of all and its lyrics of being "wasted all the time" and drinking someone off your mind hit home in just the way its author intended. Possibly because it was written, like all Spiritualized songs, from the heart. Often from a dark heart but a dark heart that's still not afraid to let love in. You have to risk being hurt sometimes.

Even when they cover the 18c hymn Oh Happy Day, rocking up the gospel arrangement that saw the Edwin Hawkins Singers turn it into a worldwide hit, it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb but slips into the set seamlessly, even proving to be something of a highlight. This avowed atheist was happy to wave his (metaphorical) arms in the air and sing along to a life affirming tale of having his sins washed away by Jesus and being taught how to watch, fight, and pray.

Spiritualized swing as much as they rock. The most instantly enjoyable track from And Nothing Hurt is The Morning After, a 7+ minute eulogy to teenage depression, suicide, and mental health problems that manages to make those things sound simultaneously serious and like the most fun anybody could ever have. As much as it balances those two seemingly disparate sentiments it also performs the old Spiritualized trick of managing to sound both incredibly simple and abnormally expansive at the same time.

I'm Your Man is almost textbook Spiritualized, guitar screeds wrap around sax squalls as Jason Pierce laconically emotes a tale of a "wasted, loaded, permanently folded" flawed lover who, given the chance, could be, maybe, "faithful, honest, and true". Here It Comes (The Road) Let's Go makes wonderful use of the choir and despite the incontestable power of their voices Jason doesn't get lost in the mix as he sits, Wizard of Oz like, in the right hand corner of the stage overseeing the whole spectacular. If you had no knowledge of Spiritualized before arriving at this gig it'd be hard for you to tell that Pierce was both band leader, songwriter, and orchestrator of the entire event. As Stevie Chick put it, in his Guardian review of this gig, "drone-rock's dark magus".

He may be skinny and unassuming, dressed casually in a white t-shirt and jeans (and, of course, shades indoors), but over nearly three decades, four if you include his years in Spaceman 3 - and you should, he's developed his own truly unique sound that despite often relying on what appear to be fairly standard rock'n'roll tropes (in Let's Dance he's "a lonely rock'n'roller, other times he prefers the adjective "lonesome" and love interest rarely has a name other than "baby" or maybe "darlin'"') avoid becoming cliched not because they're delivered tongue-in-cheek but because they're written with the exact opposite intentions. When Jason Pierce says "c'mon darling, let's dance" in Let's Dance you don't think it's a corny line. You think he wants to dance. Or 'dance'. Horizontally.

Sex, music, drugs, and God come together in an almighty quadrumvirate that seems to distil life down to its purest essences. In truth, despite the gospel stylings of the band and, of course, more naturally, the choir you could probably take God out of the equation. Spiritualized's God seems to be made up of love (or sex, the most obvious expression of love), music, and drugs. Possibly the three things that most fuck with the chemical balance of your mind. Three of the most powerful things most of us ever get to experience and three of the things that change us, affect us, in ways more quotidian pursuits will never be able to.

No I Think I'm In Love, no Medication, and no Run but Spiritualized's oeuvre is now veritable enough for them to be able to leave such songs out and still not disappoint. Life may sometimes feel like all the bad things are happening all the time but somehow Jason Pierce and his band manage, as if by some alchemical process, to make them sound like all the good things are happening all the time. Their themes of music, love, sex, drugs, and whatever your God may be don't come across so much as obsessions as salvations. Salvations that are just as useful to us in helping us cope with the modern world as they ever were in times gone by.

It was a fantastic gig, a wonderful gift from a valued friend, and our trip to, first, the Dove for a delicious pint of pale ale by the side of the river and, secondly, on to Sagar for an even more delicious dosa afterwards meant it all added up to a truly memorable evening. A memory as beautiful as the sight of the sun going down over the Arcadian idyll that was both the river Thames and the wrought-iron Hammersmith Bridge that greeted me as I arrived in W6.

"and all the angels singing just about got it right" - Soul on Fire, Spiritualized.

The London LOOP. Part IX:Uxbridge Lock to Moor Park (All Wet West of Watford and Wembley).

After three walks in glorious sunshine we were returning, not just to Uxbridge, but to more typical weather. It's the way it goes on the London LOOP. For most of the summer TADS has, understandably, taken precedence but here's an interesting development. This stage of the LOOP had as many walkers on it as the last TADS trek out to Rochester. Perhaps when we finally reach Purfleet, the LOOP's end point we'll be in double figures. Hey, why stop at that? I imagined a scenario in which every single Londoner circles the city eternally using their psychic powers to levitate St.Paul's Cathedral and destroy capitalism.

It was one of those days, a rainy one, where talking bullshit and stopping often in pubs helped us plough on when it got a bit cold, a bit wet, and finally a bit dark. If that sounds like it was no fun at all, though, that couldn't be further from the truth. We're hardy souls these days and although I, personally, prefer sunny beer gardens, shorts, and ice creams to ponchos, umbrellas, and sore nipples we all realise that in to each life, and indeed almost every walk, a little rain must fall.

And so it proved. I'd taken the Overground, Jubilee, and Metropolitan lines to Uxbridge's Charles Holden designed Art Deco tube station where I met up with Adam, Shep, Neil, Belinda, Eamon, and Pam and we headed through the thriving town centre to an arcade which hosted an Internet cafe where scenes from the recent hit TV series The Bodyguard were filmed and, more pressingly for me, a proper ol' greasy spoon cafe.

Granny Satchwill (or Granny's as the locals were calling it) served us up tea, Diet Coke, bubble'n'squeak, veggie breakfasts, and, in my case, a rather delicious cheese omelette'n'chips with four slices of generously buttered white bread. I was a bit concerned that I'd not dressed appropriately for the wet weather (the BBC Weather website had suggested a few spots of drizzle but nothing worse) but I certainly wasn't worried that I'd go hungry. Not with Granny Satchwill on the case.

Before we could join the LOOP properly, Bee was keen on showing us a couple of local landmarks and we were happy to oblige. The Hillingdon Civic Centre, designed by Andrew Derbyshire, planned in 1970, built from 1973 to 1976, and formally opened in 1979, is one of Britain's most celebrated examples of neo-vernacular architecture and still looked resplendent covered in drizzle, all sloping rooftops and 'homely' bricks.

Nearby Randalls, a closed down former department store, made good use of Art Deco lettering and geometric angles. Designed by William Eves it's been used as a location for Only Fools and Horses, given a Grade II listing, and even, in the past, been accused of displaying adverts sympathetic to Nazism. It's now the last word in faded glamour.

Past a hairdressers that used to be home to the award winning barber Adam Cripps, we reached Neil, Bee, and Eamon's past haunt The Crown & Treaty. The Treaty, as they had it, used to be THE place in Uxbridge for a live band and an indie DJ but its history goes back a lot further than that.

Situated on the road between Oxford and London it was, apparently, the logical place for the Commissioners of Charles I and Parliamentarians to meet in 1645 to try and negotiate a treaty that would have ended the English Civil War, hence the name of the pub that the building was converted into around 150 years later. The fact that the TWENTY day long meeting was fruitless seemingly forgotten.

It's here we picked up both the LOOP proper and the Grand Union Canal. Office blocks fashioned into maritime shapes flaunted their wealth to the owners of more modest narrowboats and patrons of The Swan & Bottle pub which would have looked inviting on a sunny day but (a) it wasn't a sunny day and (b) we'd hardly done any walking yet. We'd not earned a pub stop.

Flour has been milled in this area for thousands of years with the waters of the Colne river which, along with Frays River to the west, flanks the Grand Union Canal as it heads northwards in a confusion of waterways that only gets more confusing, more watery, and more beautiful as you follow the towpath along.

Narrowboats were gaily painted and named after mothers, daughters, and lovers while others looked more like submarines or floating portacabins. Wheelbarrows-a-plenty lined the sides of the canal, the inevitable brass marker posts told us how far we were from Braunston, and the smell of wood burners and bonfires evoked an almost Proustian nostalgia in former festival goers. 

We passed beneath the A40, negotiated a slippery pack horse bridge to the other side of the canal, and strolled on towards the typically pretty white cottage at Denham Lock. I'd both walked this stretch before in the rain, and had run two half-marathons along it, but this time I was both taking more in and was in the company of a man who proved to be something of a local expert. I got the impression Eamon had walked this way many many more times than me and he certainly knew his local history.

Denham Lock is the deepest lock along the whole of the Grand Union Canal and it's quite high up too. It needs to be to clear the Frays which passes, picturesquely, beneath the canal here. Wooden tables and a bird feeder look out at the view.

We soon reached Frays Valley Nature Reserve with its broad, and placid, lakes home to a selection of waterfowl, yachts, and elusive fishermen. We saw their rods. We saw their tents. But we did not see them. Gravel was once quarried here, as elsewhere in the Colne Valley, but now the pits have returned to their natural state.

It's a muddy stretch that affords plentiful views of towering pylons (always a good photo op I think) and an impressive railway bridge (ditto) before opening up near a marina packed with boats and eventually, crossing the canal again, the Horse and Barge pub. Eamon confirmed there would be a better opportunity for a pit stop very soon so we gave the Horse and Barge a swerve only to see that a children's party was happening in the garden. Fun if it's your own, or your friends', kids maybe - but stranger's kids. No, we'll continue on.

Past an abandoned blue barge that looked almost wilfully attractive in its ruinous state, a Wimbledon FC 'I CAN TASTE ONIONS' sticker (one was also spotted in Nonsuch Park earlier in the LOOP), more pylons (and, thus, more photos), more lakes, and a slightly bizarre wooden gnome sculpture peering out gingerly from behind a tree to the side of the towpath.

Eventually we reached the Coy Carp. Yes, coy. Not koi. The truth of the matter with carp is not so much that they're coy or shy but so heavily fished have they been they are now vulnerable to extinction. The Coy Carp pub, however, seemed to be doing okay despite its rather careworn outside aspect. It had a lovely big garden looking out at various waterways and, like all the pubs we'd be visiting on this stretch, at least two thirds of it had been given over to dining.

Never mind, I had a lovely pint of London Pride (which seemed an appropriate drink to be quaffing on the day the news of Rockney innovator Chas Hodges passed away reached us) and allowed my damp jumper and trousers to dry out. A bit.

Upon our egress from the Coy Carp pub we finally left the canal and the three rivers (Colne and Frays had briefly been joined by the Misbourne) behind, although we took a quick glance at the canoe slalom course and reflected on what a millrace might be (it's the current of water that turns the water wheel) and just how deadly the 'dreaded marine worm' may be (very deadly should you happen to be a wooden ship but possibly of little concern for those of us of a less nautical bent).

We now passed through open fields occasionally populated by hungry horses and a US Army vehicle. It was hard to believe that this barren, sparsely populated, and somewhat wild area was actually part of London but if there's one thing the LOOP has taught us it's that London is not the crowded urban environment many imagine but, instead, has very many different faces. Vistas reminiscent of, but less muddy than, Happy Valley near Coulsdon rolled in front of us as the skies began to darken, the temperature plummeted, and Adam, Pam, and Shep fed those hungry horses.

It was hoying down by the time we reached our next pub, and more was to follow. The Rose & Crown was an unpretentious little boozer, if you leave aside my aforementioned gripes about the largest tables of these places being given over to diners, so I took another London Pride (Gertcha!) and we sat amiably chatting for forty-five minutes or so before heading back out into 'the weather'.

Through Bishop's Wood Country Park which the guidebook told us was "a string of once-coppiced woodlands, now renowned for the richness of their plant life" but we were unable to appreciate in the rain and on to a windy, tricky to follow path, that was more overgrown, and saw more fallen trees, than any stretch of the LOOP so far. In fact it reminded me a little of a 2017 TADS adventure near Bayham Abbey, just with less animal skeletons. Across a patch of long grass we spotted our third, and final, pub of the day. The large, imposing, and yet welcoming looking Ye Olde Greene Man.

My fear that a pub which looked like a country retreat for the wealthy and well dressed of Rickmansworth may turn a septet of soiled wayfarers away proved, thankfully, unfounded. In fact Ye Olde Greene Man proved a delightful, and friendly, place to water our insides and dry out our exteriors. The London Pride was off but they had more Doom Bar than Sainsbury's so I put my beer on the sideboard, here, and we proceeded to talk of walks future and present, politics, music, and gossip. The usual stuff.

By the time we left, past the more unassuming Prince of Wales pub (so unassuming, in fact, that they'd put up a neon OPEN sign in the window, presumably to remind people it was a pub not a haunted house), we were very much in the twilight and soon, the dark proper. Neil Bacchus, no stranger to a prank or a wind-up, jumped out from behind a tree in an attempt, moderately successful, to frighten Pam and myself and we soon found ourselves on the edge of a gated community that seemed to be justifying its exclusivity, or snobbishness, by calling itself the Moor Park Conservation Area.

Some of the houses were tasteful, others less so. All looked expensive. I imagined Watford footballers like Troy Deeney to live there but Adam, three pints to the good, gave voice to his inner Trot as he speculated, not quietly, on the soulless and meaningless existences the inhabitants of these gilded prisons had. I suspect, in many cases, he was right but I'd not like to paint them all with such a broad brush. Certainly the area lacked any atmosphere, any kind of street life, and, seemingly, any kind of human interaction and it seems a shame that people see one of the benefits of enormous wealth to be the ability to shut themselves off from the world instead of a greater incentive to engage with it.

Ah well, soon the houses started to look ever so slightly less expensive and, eventually, even some flats appeared opposite a small row of shops and restaurants (no pubs, but we'd done okay on that score during our afternoon's jaunt) which included our final resting place. The Shemul was a friendly, unpretentious, Bangladeshi place where the after dinner mints were more chocolatey than normal and the hot towels hotter than standard. The food, too, was great. I had chilli paneer and porata, we shared poppadums (whatever next?), and, on perusal of the drinks menu I noticed they had Shep's all time favourite lager, Bangla.

So many times he's asked for it, so many times he'd been greeted with disappointment. I was in the toilet when he made this discovery and I was sorry to miss his little face light up with joy. To mark the occasion each and every one of us (including Eamon who doesn't like Bangla and Bee who doesn't even like beer much) had one. There's only six in the photo because Adam, and he missed out here, had decided to head back home as we entered The Shemul.

With no pubs on the 'strip' the friendly restaurant staff were happy to let us stay on for another drink, and shook our hands on departure, which, combined with the food and the other aforesaid little touches, resulted in me posting a very positive Trip Advisor review for the place.

At Moor Park station, on the other 'arm' of the Metropolitan line, we all got the tube together. The Uxbridge contingent changed at Harrow-on-the-Hill to return to from whence we'd come. Pam, Shep, and I (after being joined by scores of jubilant Anthony Joshua fans at Wembley) changed to the Jubilee at Finchley Road. Shep hopped off at Waterloo for a trip to Whistle Stop and the train to Basingstoke, Pam at London Bridge for her bus, and I stayed on until Canada Water where I caught my last train of the day back to Honor Oak Park before returning home to post a Facebook tribute to Chas Hodges.

I was tired and I was wet but I was happy. It'd been another interesting, fun, and varied day on the LOOP. Next time we start at Moor Park and pass through Oxhey Woods, Hatch End, and Harrow Weald Common before rocking up in Elstree. The weather may be no better but at least, hopefully, I shall be dressed for it. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.