Fleapit Revisited:John Was Trying To Contact Aliens.

"My mind was travelling. Travelling the cosmos" - John Shepherd.

John Shepherd from rural Michigan wasn't like other boys. His relationship with both his parents went from difficult to non-existent, he was gay at a time (and in a place) where it wasn't easy to be so, and he spent the best part of three decades trying to contact extra-terrestrials in a quest to gain extreme knowledge.

Something he felt aliens could help with. But John Shepherd, in Netflix's short (just sixteen minutes - with a warning of "emotionally intense scenes") film John Was Trying To Contact Aliens, doesn't come across as some crackpot, whackjob, or conspiracy theorist but as a kind, amiable, curious, and visionary autodidact stuck in a small town surrounded by people he couldn't identify with and who couldn't identify with him.

Matthew Killip's film shows how Shepherd, on his own, set about sending messages into outer space in the hope of some kind of salvation and those messages came in the form of music. Which Shepherd believed, as do I, as does Stewart Copeland, is the strongest form of communication humans have yet invented.

The music's not your standard rock or pop either. Not that there's, necessarily, anything wrong with that. Shepherd's choice of music (which he broadcasts on his Earth Station One shows - where he even chats like a proper DJ between tracks) is more, for want of a better word, transcendental. More universal - or at least global, it being hard to know what kind of jam ET would get his groove on to.

Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich, Harmonia, jazz, reggae, afrobeat, and gamelan are all favourites (there's an entire show you can, and should, listen to for free on theQuietus website which includes tracks from artists like Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and Cluster) and as his love for music spread out into the endless black void of space his mind, too, journeyed to other realms.

Interviewed now with grey beard and ponytail in blue jeans and brown shirt, and shown as a younger man not looking all that different, Shepherd tells of how his recording equipment (a retrofuturist's dream of dials, screens, oscillators, and attenuators) first filled his bedroom before migrating into his grandparents' living room and finally into a specially built extension.

Over Polaroids and footage of Shepherd looking pensive in the deep Michigan snow a story is told of how that thirty year search to contact extra-terrestrial intelligence may have proved fruitless (that's not a spoiler - you would have heard if he had made contact) but his efforts were not worthless. They changed his life, he found meaning within himself, and he gave himself the opportunity to find some things he thought he may never find. Love and warmth.

John Was Trying To Contact Aliens is both, quite literally, short and sweet (and the music is fantastic from start to finish) but, to me, it was an important story. A story about how the only life worth living is one in which you are true to yourself. If you quest for knowledge hard enough you will, I believe, eventually find it - and it may not be what you expect. 

History, mystery, and the Marvel universe:Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema S2.

When the second series of Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema aired on BBC4 in March 2020 I somehow managed to miss it (not sure why - was something else going on?). I only realised this when I sat down to watch the third series and looked at the iPlayer. I thought I better watch the second series first. Despite living in chaos, I do like at least some order.

The format's not changed much from the first series (Kim Newman's back on board as chief writer, Kermode's still got a natty black suit, and the set is still a very basic room mocked up with the sort of projectors and lights you'd expect to see in a studio) and it doesn't really have to. The formula works. Mark Kermode shows us film clips and then stands in a room talking about them, threading a narrative through them to describe how different genres of film work, how they're constructed, and how they're changing.

Or, how little they really have changed below the surface technology. For series two he's tackling superhero movies, British history on film, and spy flicks and he kicks off his journey with the genre that is currently the most dominant of all. Those men and women in outrageous outfits with outrageous abilities who are out there fighting for truth, fighting for justice, or fighting to overcome some long standing psychological trauma.

 

Superheroes set out with a simple mission to save the world but have ended up conquering it. Conquering it with their special fx, sequels, and franchises. It's a genre so dominant now that even the villains, like Joker, get their own movies. It's a genre so dominant now that some esteemed directors (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach) have dismissed the films as 'boring', 'despicable', and even, patently untruthfully, 'not cinema'.

Using clips from Avengers:Endgame, Avengers:Infinity War, Captain Marvel, Aquaman, Spider-Man, Tarzan the Ape Man, 1922's Robin Hood, The Mask of Zorro, The Bat Whispers, Spawn, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, Village of the Damned, The Mask, Hancock, Unbreakable, Koi... Mil Gaya, Rendel, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, The Bourne Identity, Jason and the Argonauts, Deadpool, The Poseidon Adventure, Brightburn, and Teen Titans Go To The Movies, Kermode strings together the component parts that make a good, or bad, superhero feature film.

A genre of film that began with lo-fi fisticuffs, moved into the camp exploits of the sixties Batman TV series, and has ended up employing an army of special fx technicians. Kermode posits that the four big game changers throughout the genre's history have been Richard Donner's 1978 Superman, Tim Burton's Batman (1989), Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), and the all conquering Marvel Universe which began its run, also in 2008, with Jon Favreau directing Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man.

Superhero movies love a good origin story and some superheroes are born with their powers, some are given them, some come to them accidentally, and some work hard to gain them. When a superhero first gains their power it can be both exhilarating and terrifying for them at the same time. A typical scene may include leaping across the rooftops of New York skyscrapers but it may also be shrinking to the size of an ant. Three of the most common superpowers our heroes have are ones humans have probably dreamed of for years:- brutal strength, super speed, and, most of all, the ability to fly through the air.

Normally, there's a snazzy costume thrown in too which is useful because, for some reason, superheroes like to conceal their identity. A tradition that dates back, Kermode informs us, to Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel. This gives directors a handy plot device and often much of the quieter drama in the lives of your average superhero comes when their civilian life and their costumed life collide, most effectively in the field of romance.

Several superhero stories will end with the protagonist, very often the titular character, shedding the burden of heroism for a normal life of romantic, or domestic, bliss. Or at least they would if it wasn't for those baddies forcing them to don tights and cape and get back out there and put in another shift, in yet another sequel.

For every superhero there is a supervillain and often several (Batman had Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, and many more). The supervillain is often full of self-regard and secretly jealous of the superhero. They often have a fiendish plot that is often as much about their indifference to human life as it is purely murderous in intent. Witness Superman's nemesis Lex Luther plotting to destroy most of California so he can rebuild his property empire there.

More than anything though, the supervillain is most effective when they get inside the head of the superhero - as the superhero has no doubt got into theirs. Some will be so villainous, so evil, so murderous in intent that one superhero may not be enough to counter them. Giving us that fairly recent, and highly lucrative, phenomenon of the superhero team building exercise.

Think 2017's Justice League (Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman - together at last) and 2012's The Avengers. Other than The Incredibles (a cartoon family of superheroes) these collaborations never seem to be easy. There will be obstacles and rivalries to be overcome and often this will need to be done, as with much else in the genre, with a massive violent fight.

The ordeal of team building will be as nothing compared to the ordeal that the superhero will have to undergo before they can save the day. We need to see our heroes fail before we can truly enjoy seeing them succeed. They will have to pass almost impossible (for mere mortals) tests of strength and will power before they can prosper and often these tests will be based on our all too human fears:- drowning, falling, being buried alive.

Usually our hero will recover to fight again but sometimes they will die a good and noble death. Almost always followed by a rebirth. There's simply too much money in these films to let these dudes lay peacefully and that brings us to our final question. May they, soon, finally get that long awaited rest? Have we reached peak superhero? Have the studios overdone it and squeezed the genre too hard, killed the golden goose? Are we, to use superhero vernacular, reaching Ragnarok?

For the second episode of the series, Kermode breaks format (slightly) and instead of splitting up the genre into its component parts he runs through the films chronologically, not in the order they were made but in the era they were set, and that's almost certainly the best way to understand the story of the British history film.

A genre of film that tells us Brits that (a) we have a LOT of history, (b) that history is a highly exportable commodity, and (c) we really like a good fight. Many of these films, Braveheart being a prime example, are said to be full of woefully inaccurate period detail but it's been widely recognised over the years that a good myth always tends to outperform the truth.

Zulu, Darkest Hour, The Favourite, The Young Victoria, Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lion in Winter, Robin Hood (again, this time in various forms from Errol Flynn to Kevin Costner if sadly not the Disney version), A Man For All Seasons, Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, Witchfinder General, A Field in England, Barry Lyndon, Tom Jones, Gunga Din, Mrs Brown, Victoria and Abdul, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Dunkirk, Rocketman, and The King's Speech.

There are, I say again, a lot of films about British history. Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales (1972) needs to be immediately added to your must see list featuring, as it does, a performance by Robin Askwith and a scene where Satan farts monks out of his bumhole.

Films about early British history like the factually correct and heavyweight Carry on Cleo (1964) show Romans like Sid James moaning about the crappy British weather. Another Roman, Michael Fassbender in 2010's Centurion, complained that Britain was "the arsehole of the world". Again, the weather had got to him.

Despite our drizzle and grey skies (looks out the window - yup, fact checked) many of these early British historical films look like Westerns or war movies and they often seem to call on myths and legends more than they do on recorded history of actual events. Medieval Britain seems to consist of almost nothing except duelling, archery, and swinging from ropes.

There's a little bit of time set aside to explore the rivalries between Normans and Saxons and between Thomas a Becket and Henry II. Another Thomas and Henry rivalry (Thomas More and Henry VIII) served film makers looking to capture the Tudor period well, an era of beheading, political machinations, and struggles to hold on to the throne. 

In Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, Charles Laughton portrays the monarch as a Holbein painting come to life and, possibly, pioneered the idea of the Tudor king as a man who gnawed on raw meat while dressed in ermine behind lavish banqueting tables.

The Civil War, roundheads and cavaliers, Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, Matthew Hopkins touring East Anglia looking for 'witches' to execute. The 17th century in Britain looked like a depressing, and dangerous, time to be alive yet the next century, the 18th, could barely look more different.

At least if you're watching movies. Stately homes, baroque music, and people seeking to increase both their wealth and their social standing as the British Empire enriched the nation. Very few films set in this era care to mention that Britain's new found wealth was founded on the back of slavery but Amma Asante's 2013 Belle is an honourable exception and it is to Kermode's credit that he doesn't miss that out.

Films made about the 19th century, the Victorian era, often have more of a sense of social justice. Mike Leigh's 2018 Peterloo (which I reviewed and you can read about here) tells the story of the Peterloo massacre of 1819 which saw the death of eighteen people when cavalry charged into a crowd of around sixty thousand people who had gathered in a field in Manchester to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

Comrades (1986, dir:Bill Douglas) tells the story of how, in 1834, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were arrested for forming a trade union and then follows the story as they are sent to Australia to toil in the harsh desert sun as punishment. Not all films made about the era fought the good fight though. Tony Richardson's Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) shows huge deference to the establishment and, most of all, to Victoria and Albert.

As you might expect, many of the historical films set in the last century focus on the two world wars but there are plenty of East End gangsters (The Krays with Gary and Martin Kemp) and pop music (Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Blinded by the Light, and Billy Elliot) too. Phil Collins playing a great train robber in 1988's Buster fills the middle of that Venn Diagram very neatly and we realise our recent history is played out as much in pop culture as it is on battlefields or in grand palaces.

Goldfinger, Skyfall, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The 39 Steps, Notorious, The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest, From Russia with Love, Carve her Name with Pride, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 5 Fingers, Kiss Me Deadly, You Only Live Twice, Casino Royale, The Conversation, Austin Powers, True Lies, Misson:Impossible, Clear and Present Danger, and Bridge of Spies. The third and final show sees Kermode (and Newman) offer their take on the spy film.

The cloak and dagger men, the secret agents, and the hired assassins. Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft was an early fictional spy or 'operative' but it was Hitchock who popularised espionage on the silver screen. He was attracted to it because of its psychological dimension. By how anyone could be, at any given moment, thrown into a dangerous world beyond their comprehension.

Using plot devices like his famous McGuffins and employing his legendary talent for suspense, Hitchcock was able to show how small men could find themselves caught up in vast intrigues that would, as the spy movie evolved, lead to global events that could even threaten Armageddon.

Even his notorious cameos had a whiff of espionage about them. Hitchock wasn't the first (in 1913 Louis Feuillade made Fantomas and in 1922 Fritz Lang directed Dr Mabuse, der Spieler) film maker to draw on the shadowy world of sleuths, gumshoes, and double crossing informers but he almost perfected the genre to the extent that the next big development in the world of the spy spun the entire genre on its axis.

In 1962, Dr No saw James Bond make his first cinematic outing and this spy didn't hide in the background at all, he even told people his name and how he liked his drinks mixed. Other secret agents soon followed in Bond's path. James Coburn's Derek Flint in Our Man Flint, Dean Martin's Matt Helm in The Wrecking Crew, and television spies like Dangerman and The Man from UNCLE. Even Fred Flintsone went undercover in 1966's The Man Called Flintstone!

You'd barely recognise him (and having TOP SECRET written on your case won't draw attention to you)! Cavemen, it seemed, were allowed to enter the world of espionage before women or people of colour but when Halle Berry appeared (out of the sea in a bikini, like Urusula Andress in Dr No, natch) in the 2012 Bond film Die Another Day as Jinx Johnson she broke both those moulds.

Berry's Jinx wasn't simply one of 007's conquests. She fought alongside Bond. Other female spies came in the form of Angelina Jolie (Salt, 2010), Charlize Theron (Atomic Blonde, 2017), and, at a stretch, Anne Parillaud in Luc Besson's 1990 Nikita. Monica Vitti's Modesty Blaise (1966) had the best intentions but didn't quite cut it according to Kermode.

I've not seen it. I can't comment. I digress. Once we've decided who is going to be our spy we need to get them kitted out. Unlike the superheroes this doesn't tend to involve a brightly coloured cape and wearing their pants outside of their trousers. It's more about the tech and the more fanciful and ludicrous the better. Knives protruding from attache cases, invisible cars, and hidden cameras (cf. The Lives of Others).

The Lives of Others feels horribly real (because it sort of was) but many other spy capers are so daft they hardly need Rowan Atkinson's Johnny English to send them up. Other common themes in the spy movie include the spy chief (M for James Bond) whose attempts to impose order on their maverick charges tend to lead to tricky relationships and pursuit scenes through crowded airports or railway stations in which the pursuer tries desperately hard not to lose track of their prey.

Some spies, like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and Gary Oldman's George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, are less flashy, and more diligent in their work. They may question their own morality and reasons for taking the job, they may be men as flawed as those they are monitoring and, unlike Bond, their bedposts may remain notch free.

In the sixties and seventies the Cold War, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate destroyed, not for the last time, faith in establishments and belief in the American dream and the film industry followed the cue and started making movies about secret establishment cabals. Films like John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor.

In these films the enemies were uncertain and protean but the more mainstream spies like James Bond had obvious foes, often with easily distinguishable traits and features. Ernst Blofeld, head of SPECTRE, famously had a scar running down his right cheek and would sit stroking his Persian cat. An image ripe for satire and an open goal Mike Myers couldn't resist when creating Dr Evil, the nemesis of Austin Powers.

Inspired by Fu Man Chu, these villains would often come mob handed. There'd be an arsenal of thugs (Oddjob, Jaws), snitches, informers, and disposable goons who could be despatched imaginatively and summarily early on in each spy caper to the delight of the audience.

But once the spy reaches the heart of the evil machine, the inner sanctum of aforesaid foe, things cannot be so straightforward. Our spy will have to escape, time and again, from ever more precarious and lethal looking situations. Much like, in fact, the superheroes. Unexploded bombs ticking away is a popular favourite as are elaborate Heath Robinsonesque torture devices. In Moonraker, James Bond is pushed out of the open door of an aeroplane and still manages to survive.

Once Bond, or some other spy, has survived this final test all he needs to do is thwart the evil scheme, blow up a few secret bases, and then relax, often with a drink and a beautiful lady. Other spy movies end less triumphantly. With uncertainty, with defeat, and even with death.

Mark Kermode's Secrets of the Cinema series two ended in certainty (I even got a drink though sadly neither Ursula Andress nor Halle Berry were available to join me). It was certainly as good as the first series (Kermode's a safe pair of hands, he won't let you down) and it's certainly back for a third series. No doubt I'll write about that too when I watch it. No doubt you won't read it. Certainly not this far.

 

 

How 'Lucky' We Am:It's A Sin.

"When I look back upon my life it's always with a sense of shame. I've always been the one to blame for everything I long to do. No matter when or where or who has one thing in common too. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a sin" - It's A Sin - The Pet Shop Boys.

When looking for a title for his five piece drama on growing up gay in London during the first decade of the AIDS crisis (1981-1991), Russell T Davies must have felt The Pet Shop Boys' 1987 No 1 hit was an absolute no-brainer. Not because there is sin, or shame - its eternal and unwanted friend, about being gay, being HIV positive, or dying of AIDS but because huge swathes of British society at the time, from our families to our institutions to our media, insisted that homosexuality was both sinful and shameful and there was often a belief that dying of AIDS was no better than what gay people deserved. 

I grew up in the decade. I remember the jokes and I remember the homophobia that didn't even hide itself behind ribald humour. Judging by the Channel 4 drama, Russell T Davies (so brilliant in the past with Years and Years, Queer as Folk, and, I have been reliably informed, Dr Who) has a pretty good memory of the decade too as is easily evinced by the period trappings that provide the background to a story that proves powerful, emotional, and, you'll not be surprised, ultimately incredibly harrowing.

The Sealink ferry, the cans of Special Brew, the motors (almost always a certain shade of green), the pint glasses, the pubs those pints are consumed in, the crockery, the Golden Wonder crisps, the toga parties, The Cannonball Run on VCR, and This Is Your Life and Michael Barrymore on TV. All of these things belonged exactly in the eighties I lived through and were captured spectacularly and with neither nostalgia nor disdain.

More as a simple fact of life in that era. The music too was an almost encyclopedic journey through the decade's best pop, synth, post-punk, and gay anthems. OMD's Enola Gay, Bad Manners, The Teardrop Explodes, Kelly Marie's Feels Like I'm In Love, Soft Cell, Culture Club, Joy Division, Kim Wilde, Divine, Blondie, Eurythmics, Yazz, Belinda Carlisle, REM, Erasure, The Flying Pickets, Hooked on Classics (!), Kate Bush, Laura Branigan, and, of course, Bronski Beat's Smalltown Boy.

The ultimate anthem of small town alienation and desire for escape. Even the graphic used for the title cards looked like they'd been cribbed from a Wham! t-shirt. But, of course, It's A Sin was far more than a trip down memory lane, a Peter Kay sketch in episode format so we could reminisce on all our yesterdays. It showed how ignorance, homophobia, incuriosity, and a dogged, stubborn determination to stick to the old ways ended up making life a misery for an entire generation of gay men, their friends, and their families.

But not before they'd had a lot of fun first. It's A Sin doesn't shy away from showing how (some of) its main protagonists enjoyed a highly promiscuous lifestyle of threesomes, orgies, and sharing multiple partners at the same time but it doesn't judge them for it and nor should it have done. All but one sexual encounter is consensual and everyone looks like, and agrees they are, enjoying it very much.

The drama revolves around a group of friends who converge together in London and eventually buy a house together, The Pink Palace, which becomes a venue for wild parties, those aforementioned orgies, and even vaguely Dadaist cabaret performances. There's Ritchie (Olly Alexander), over from the Isle of Wight where his parents, Clive (Shaun Dooley) and Valerie (Keeley Hawes), are very much parents of that era.

Clive calls Ritchie a "stupid little dreamer" because he wants to become an actor and Valerie is the dutiful wife of a man who, constantly sporting a brown leather jacket, can barely understand who his own son actually is and calls Margaret Thatcher 'Maggie' to indicate how happily he supports her. Ritchie's best friend, when he arrives in London is Jill (Lydia West - so good in both Years and Years and Dracula).

She's his rock and the pair are soon joined by Roscoe (Omari Douglas), Colin (Callum Scott Howells), and Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), Ritchie's first ever gay lover. Colin's a shy Welsh lad who finds work at a tailoring firm where he fights off the advances of the sleazy lech Mr Hart (Nicholas Blane), earns the nickname Gladys (after Ruth Madoc's character in Hi-De-Hi), and becomes friends with Savile Row salesman Henry Coltrane. An urbane, plummy, and cultured gay man a decade or so older with an Argentian boyfriend Juan Pablo (at the time of the Falklands War this was risking double trouble) who is played, pleasingly, by Doogie Howser MD, Neil Patrick Harris.

Colin's mum, Eileen (Andria Doherty), is the sort of kindly lady who loves her son unconditionally but Roscoe's Nigerian heritage family, sister Solly (Shaniqua Okwok) excepted, prove less understanding of their son's homosexuality. They're very religious and while he's working on a building site they're suspicious about him working with men. When they learn of his true nature and leanings their intolerance and desire to 'cure' him becomes so much of a threat to him that he simply has no choice but to leave the nest.

Something he does with a flourish. Props too should go to Stephen Fry who plays a closeted Tory MP who gets a hard-on thinking about Thatcher and asks his lover to be 'nanny', Neil Ashton as gay activist Grizzle, and, most of all, David Carlyle as Gloria, a Scottish punk a decade or so older than the rest of the gang who has moved down from Glasgow and found, finally, a place of belonging and acceptance. 

The excitement of first moving to London is caught brilliantly and accurately and all the characters, major and minor, are realistic, nuanced, and engrossing. It took me about fifteen minutes into the second episode before I started welling up and by the end of the series I was in bits but that should encourage you to watch, not put you off.

Because It's A Sin is a fascinating piece of social history that finds its parallels, only too neatly, in our current time's Covid pandemic - although it's worth noting the rush to find a vaccine seemed less urgent with AIDS than it did with Covid-19. For some reason.

Similarities are inescapable though. AIDS, like Covid, when it first arrived was a disease nobody truly understood and many, including those who would go on to die from it, denied. The arrival of AIDS, the "gay flu", saw it mistaken for pneumonia or psittacosis (a kind of parrot fever), dismissed as a money making racket for big pharma, and theories come into existence that it was created in a laboratory, spread by the Russians, or by poppers, or by bestiality, or, most weirdly and of its time of all, Freddie Laker. 

Even as lesions start appearing and young men start being taken to hospital, doctors remain dismissive of those eager to be informed about the disease and AIDS patients are virtually imprisoned and treated as a 'public menace'. They're held to blame and, in a very real sense, shamed for what has happened to them.

Families of AIDS sufferers are traduced, turds are posted through their letterboxes, and funeral companies refuse to bury those who have fallen to the disease. Even when a funeral is held the boyfriend of the deceased is barred from attending. Gay men face the threat of the sack from their jobs or the refusal of a mortgage simply because of their sexual preferences, Clause 28 (to stop the 'promotion' of homosexual lifestyles) is put in place by the Thatcher administration, and police brutality is dished out to gay men and their allies in broad daylight.

As the death toll rises steeply and grimly, it becomes apparent that ignorance and homophobia, rather than homosexuality, were, and are, the genuine public menace and for every small victory, like Roscoe pissing in Margaret Thatcher's coffee - "black man's piss" he gleefully adds, there are several far deeper and darker tragedies at play.

Which, by the final episode, become so overwhelming you almost have to steel yourself to watch them. But you should do. Because It's A Sin was brilliant, tender, touching, and still, sadly, highly pertinent. The homophobia and the ignorance of the eighties hasn't simply evaporated. It went off to hide in darkened corners until encouraged, tacitly or explicitly, to return by populist politicians.

You'd think the sight of people wearing face masks in hospitals would seem quite normal now but, somehow, it still looks eerie and scary when those hospitals don't seem to have evolved much since Victorian times. It's A Sin shows that in a stark and honest way and while the party scenes and the friendship bonds between the main characters remind us there is always hope the rife homophobic ignorance at the time, personal, professional, and political, reminds us there is also always hate and though they are always at war with each other I still believe hope triumphs hate every time. Judging by It's A Sin I think Russell T Davies does too. The first masterpiece of 2021.

Kakistocracy IX:How Does It Feel To Be The Father Of One Hundred Thousand Dead?

"Your arrogance has gutted these bodies of life, your deceit fooled them that it was worth the sacrifice. Your lies persuaded people to accept the wasted blood, your filthy pride cleansed you of the doubt you should have had" - How Does It Feel? - Crass

How Does It Feel? by Crass was written about Margaret Thatcher and The Falklands War but we can, today, repurpose many of its lyrics to the mishandling of a pandemic by an even worse PM - Boris Johnson - an even worse cabinet, and the predictable and predicted far far higher death toll than the one thousand dead cited by Crass. A death toll which now, according to the ONS (Office of National Statistics), stands north of one hundred thousand and was said to be at 107,907 as far back as January 15th.

This grim milestone, that many could see on the horizon some time ago, has finally been reached - and surpassed - and that's not due to UK population density, average age of the UK population, the obesity of the public, because there were BLM marches in the summer, or because two women met at a reservoir in Derbyshire for a walk and a cup of coffee.

It's been met because our government lied when we needed truth, blustered when we needed assurance, and divided when we needed unifying. By many reports we have the highest per head death toll on the planet and the only nations above us in the list of overall deaths are the USA (the Trump effect), Brazil, India, and Mexico. All of which have considerably larger populations.

When Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid interviewed the Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey this morning she claimed the outrageously high death toll was due to the average age of the UK population and the level of obesity. When Morgan asked her if she was blaming the public for being too old or too fat, Coffey said she thought that was offensive although he'd merely paraphrased her words and thrown them back at her. It was her first appearance on GMB for eight months after refusing to go on, much as most government ministers refuse to be interviewed on, or held to account by, Newsnight and judging by the way she promptly ended her Zoom call it'll be even longer before she reappears.

You can argue about the reason a person died of Covid-19 (age, obesity, our new favourite the underlying health condition) but you can't deny that person has a right to have lived and been looked after or dismiss their death as seemingly inevitable as Coffey chose to. You can also argue the definition of a Covid-19 death and, indeed, I've heard people claim that though many of the people who have died have done so within twenty-eight days of a positive test they may have died of other causes. Being run over by a bus always seems to be cited as an example but I've not heard of a global pandemic of bus drivers running people over and it seems unlikely bus drivers have suddenly, weirdly, lost their ability to drive properly. Most of are stuck indoors most days so we don't even get the chance to get run over by a bus. 

When people chose to express these theories, as I have heard many do, they are simply making excuses for a purposefully negligent and incompetent government and refusing to hold them to account. They don't even seem to be on message with each other in the cabinet these days. Matt Hancock says restrictions will stay in place at almost exactly the same time as Johnson announced they're thinking about lifting them. 

It makes them look incompetent and in a way they are but the incompetence, or performative pretence of it, is part of the bigger strategy. If they divide us enough, distract us enough so as we're all shouting at, and snitching on, each other they're getting away with it - and will probably continue too. They've found a way to work this pandemic to their favour.

As have done the ten richest people in the world (among them likely candidates like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg) who have increased their personal fortunes by £400bn (£40bn each on average) since the start of the pandemic. Just as many others fear starvation, death, inability to feed or clothe their families, eventual homelessness, unemployment, anxiety, and depression.

It'd be nice to see these mega-billionaires help out but, like the Johnson administration, they're, for the most part, in it for themselves so I wouldn't bank on it. Instead we have to help each other and not rely on the government or tech giants to come to our aid. That's difficult when you live alone and can't meet up with people.

I'm sure I'll catch up with some friends soon but since I last wrote on this subject I've not seen anyone IRL. Luckily I've been kept comparatively sane by chatting with Michelle, Adam, Shep, Vicki, Simon, Ian, Chris, Neil, Pam, Kathy, Darren, Cheryl, Tony and my parents and by doing quizzes with the Kahoot gang and good news has come with the vaccinations, something this country is handling exceedingly well - so far. Both my dad and my friend Valia have had their first jab. I've also lifted the spirits with walks in and around Dulwich Park and Peckham Rye Park and, as ever, with music and television.

Which has been helpful as these last two or three weeks have, for me, been the toughest, mentally, of the whole pandemic. I'm hanging in there and starting to feel better and more positive about myself. I only wish I could feel better and more positive about the future of the UK. In all honesty, I don't believe it has one. Not under this kakistocracy.