Survivors, BBC 1

Survivors has made it to a second series, with decent enough ratings in the first 2 episodes to mean that it will probably be picked up for a third. I have been watching it since the beginning, intrigued by the concept behind the show (killer virus decimates the population, only a handful of people survive), but I have been seriously disappointed with the show, and only continue watching in the hope that it will get better.

Let's get it straight first of all: it's not a bad show by any stretch of the imagination - the concept is pretty strong, and it has some interesting ideas running through the series. For instance, the different types of communities which are being built up by the disparate groups of survivors is pretty well done, and it doesn't lurch into "liberal issue of the week" mode all that often. The acting is passable, the majority of the characters believable, and it has just enough intrigue to keep you waiting for the next episode.

It's an OK TV show. But that's as much as you can say about it. I think the problem is that my expectations of what a series can do, and what it should be about have been raised by The Wire. Actually, not even just The Wire; Lost, for example, helped to raise the bar of what a TV series can be by having long running stories spread across the whole series, with different groups of people being introduced before they actually "interact" with the main group, and with the motivations of those characters being fully realised and shown to the viewer.

This is not the case with Survivors, where characters beyond the main group are merely cyphers to move the plot ever-onwards. They are introduced for an episode, have a bit of plot exposition with the main characters, then are written out at the end of the episode. The repetition of this device is jarring in the extreme, and especially so in the last episode, where we were saw for the first time the wife and child of the "evil scientist". This could have done an amazing amount for this character: it would have given light to the scientist, so that we know that he isn't just evil; we could have explored what it meant to him to discover the vaccine, we could have seen a human side to him. We could also have explored what it was like to be cooped up in a small lab, with no way of getting outside and knowing what was actually out there. Instead, we get the evil scientist still doing his "evil" voice, even to his wife and child. We get the wife suddenly trying to escape, and then helping Abby to escape. She is not developed. She does not develop a main character. She is there merely for plot, and nothing else.

The plots are also becoming more and more unbelievable, and form nothing more than pegs to hang a bit of set-piece casual violence and/or silent brooding from Max Beesley. I accept that there has to be some suspension of disbelief to enable the drama to function, but the plot holes are getting ever larger, and more stupid. How can Abby escape from a high security lab, and evade capture from a well-trained unit with trucks and helicopters, while she is just dressed in a surgical gown.

I guess I am comparing the series to what it could have been: they could easily have stretched the 'Abby missing' storyline over the whole series, with the resolution of them finding each other at the end of the series or something. Instead, it's almost as if the writers got bored with the idea, so decided to end it as quickly as possible.

The bar for TV series has been raised by American studios, who have shown there is a mass audience who are more than capable of handling and enjoying multi-stranded, open-ended story lines that last for the whole series (or longer). The BBC are so far behind the game that home-grown programmes look out of date before they have even finished airing.

grumble, grumble, grumble

It's a well-known fact that when things go wrong, they generally go wrong altogether at the same time. This a cruel joke played by God* to push you to absolute breaking point.

I had to wake up early this morning, as work had a release going out before 8am. I had planned to get the 7.20am train, but missed this by a matter of seconds. For this I blame the traffic lights at the pedestrian crossing by the train station: I waited there for about half a minute before they changed and allowed me to cross. I also blame the guy who tried to beg 20p off of me on the way to the station - if he had not accosted me for 10 seconds, I may have made the pedestrian crossing on the previous change, and hence got on my train. A salutory warning there about the good reasons for ignoring the plight of the homeless.

Having missed the train, and with the next one in 20 minutes (so I would be late) I set off for the tube. Traffic jams meant that I didn't get on the tube until 7.45 anyway, so I should have stayed where I was (although the bus was warm, so I was at least up on that deal).

After struggling into work, the release didn't actually happen: a problem meant that the resources had changed, but that the network wasn't picking them up. I also realised that I had forgotten my breakfast, lunch and my front door keys. Happy days.







*(other omniscient beings are available)

Are you happy?

Love this: the texture, the message, the design. Everything about it is wonderful.

Kitchen Nemesis, Part 1

I have a kitchen nemesis. She does not know that she is my sworn enemy, but her ignorance does not protect her. We are engaged in a fraught and dangerous struggle, and only one of us will win. I am determined to overcome this pernicious individual by any means necessary.

Let me explain. We have a kitchen at work: it is a fairly small space, with enough room for a toaster, microwave, and coffee machine on the sideboard. At best, 2 people can get into this space at any one time - any more than this, and a fantastically complicated jigsaw of pirouettes and avoidance must be performed in order to fit everyone in. This kitchen serves as a central hub for around 30-40 people on our floor.

Most people, having experienced the dizziness of negotiating this small nook of a kitchen, tend to try and get in and out with a minimum of fuss, and spend as little time in there as possible, so as to inconvenience anyone else as little as possible.

Not the kitchen nemesis: oh no. She has decided that this is the perfect place to talk to her colleague about all kinds of things, often for 10 minutes at a time, while she slowly butters a single piece of toast. Rather than having this conversation at her desk (her henchman and partner in crime sits opposite her, anyway), they continue their trivial small talk in the kitchen, preventing anyone else from entering, and generally being a nuisance, and flouting the unspoken rules of the kitchen.

I shall have my revenge. Oh yes, I shall have my revenge.

The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway

I found this to be an incredibly powerful book, one which stayed with me for quite a while after finishing it. I actually read it well before Juliet, Naked, but have only felt able to comment on it now, after careful consideration time.

It is often hard, when you see a catastrophe on the news, to understand how people are feeling and living through that catastrophe. You can empathise with them, and understand that they are suffering a great deal, but the event is so large, and so overwhelmingly different to your every day life, that it is impossible to even try and guess how the people caught up in the middle would be able to get through it. The news is good at giving the background to the conflict: the hows, the whys, the major players, and can give a snapshot or two of what is happening at the current time: a man scurrying across the road under fire, but it cannot tell you what it feels like to be that man.

This book goes some way to attempt to describe the day-to-day scrabble for survival for 3 different people in the ruins of Sarajevo. Their stories are intertwined around the titular cellist, and detail in very simple, stark, language, how they go about surviving while their world crumbles around them. Not only do you get a sense of how difficult simply getting water and bread is, but also how war desensitises and dehumanises all those involved: soldiers and civilians alike.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

I have always tried to make time to read a new Nick Hornby book, and I generally read them with a lot of goodwill and fondness in my heart. The goodwill is entirely irrational, based as it is on the fact that he, like me, is an Arsenal fan, and is therefore surely a sign that he is a good egg and deserving of all good things that would come to him. His unambiguous moral superiority, based on the fact that he supports the same team as me, means that I read his books wishing and hoping that each new tome will be better than the last, and that I will enjoy the book even more than I enjoyed Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, or About a Boy.

After finishing the book, which is effectively a treatise on the nature of fandom, I seriously pondered my (misplaced?) allegiances to him, and the reasons behind why I wanted his books to be brilliant. Like Duncan, a character who's relationship with the works of a once-famous rock star is bordering on obsessive, Hornby's early work struck a chord with me - in the case of Fever Pitch an almost primal chord, and as a result I greedily read and re-read everything he subsequently published. I found a reflection of myself in many of the characters he wrote about, and as such learned a bit more about myself: sometimes an unflattering lesson, but one that I was glad of as a nervous teen/20 year old. Does the fact that I did not enjoy the book quite as much as his previous books say more about Hornby's direction as a writer, or about my own changes in taste? Or does it in fact reveal more about my snobby "fan" character that is satirised so well here?

The book revolves around a long-dormant rock star, Tucker Crowe, who achieved a reasonable amount of success in the mid-eighties before giving up that life in mysterious circumstances. In the intervening years he has developed a cult following, helped along by Internet obsessives and his media silence. The release of the demo tapes of his most successful album provides the catalyst for one of these obsessives, Duncan, to split up with his long term partner, Annie after they disagree about the genius (or lack thereof) of the new album. This also brings Tucker into their lives, after he contacts Annie after she posts a review of the album online.

It was a fine book, and on some level I did enjoy reading it (as evidenced by the fact that it only took me 3 days to finish it), but it didn't grab me as much as it should have done. The observations on men and women and their relationships to culture were, as ever, spot on, especially their relationship with that culture in relation to the Internet. However, the characters never felt real to me, and although their intellectual lives were well rounded, their actual lives were nothing more than sketches. In "High Fidelity", I really wanted Rob and Laura to get back together, and I felt like I knew them: this is not the case here, and although I enjoyed the book, there was no one person that I could identify with, and so I wasn't bothered about how it ended.

In the end then, a disappointment: but only in the way that you wish that your once favorite band would release something quite as good as their debut. The new stuff is still enjoyable, and has touches of what you really liked about them in the first place, but the familiar refrains seem tired and overdone.