We were blind to Woody Allen’s problematic aspects back in the 80s. Consciousness un-raised, we watched Manhattan and admired the black and white cinematography and laughed at the jokes, and didn’t baulk at the creepy on-screen relationship between a man in his 40s and a teenager. Zelig was less problematic: an early example of the kind of thing that would wow the world a decade later in Forrest Gump. It was funny, and best of all, under 80 minutes long. Bliss! I probably wouldn’t watch it today, if only to avoid seeing how shonky the special effects were.
I probably did see it at the National Theatre, which as I said before was a wonder to me, notwithstanding the rumbling of traffic passing overhead. And I really did notice a preponderance of nerdy looking blokes in glasses accompanied by beautiful young women.
Ronnie’s date to see the film with Mel is not without its fraught moments. Remember fraught dates? Locked in your own head, unable to express yourself, or afraid to, saying too much, or too little, spiralling into misunderstanding, reconciliation, snogging.
Great, wasn’t it? Jumpers for goalposts. If I could meet my younger self, what advice would I give? You’re on your own, kid. Fuck off.
Travelling through the outer ‘burbs of London on the train, passing night windows and catching glimpses of people’s lives through uncurtained windows. Sitting side by side in a near-deserted train, coat over your laps, locked in a clinch or two. And at the end of it all, you burn with a new understanding of someone you’d been both right and wrong about, someone you’d misunderstood and underestimated, an enigma. Yearning, longing, all loved up with nowhere to go.
Also in this chapter, Ronnie tells the story of how he ended up working for the Department: it’s my story, more or less. I really did feel kind of bounced into a job that I was then trapped in, thanks to being blacklisted. Hilarious!
Fireworks night. Ronnie and Mel travel to London to see a film. But when she suddenly jumps off the tube train at Leicester Square, Ronnie loses her, and things begin to seem unreal.
Housekeeping & links
If you’re impatient to read ahead, I’ve published a revised ebook of The Obald:
I have also revised and updated the paperback edition, which is now live. Unfortunately, this print-on-demand stuff ends up being expensive. I tried to make a nice book, a nice thing to have. Anyway, here’s a link to the UK store for the paperback, and the same for the US store.
Since I started subscribing to Apple News (by default as part of the ONE sub), I’ve been perusing the odd lifestyle or cookery magazine, looking at some recipes. I’m completely out of step with the times, as usual, because I find the busy-ness and fussyness of a lot of contemporary recipes really offputting. Plates with bits and pieces scattered all over, a list of ingredients as long as your arm… been there, done that. My attitude to such food is best exemplified by my soup making. I make a good soup, but I think three ingredients (not including liquids) is perfectly sufficient. Anything more is too fussy.
My darkest culinary secret is that I have never understood the appeal of fresh pasta, and I have (as a consequence) never made it. Of course, this might mean I’ve never properly tried it, given that what passes for “fresh pasta” in supermarkets might not be all that fresh. But I have tried the supermarket stuff, and not only is it not better than the dried variety, it’s not as good as the dried variety. Dried pasta keeps for ages, cooks in a few minutes, and tends not to disintegrate.
I think I probably have had home made fresh pasta, at my sister’s. No further comment, other than to say that I’d have been just as happy with dried. For me, pasta falls into the same category as puff pastry and croissants: yes, you could make it yourself, but why bother when you can get perfectly decent stuff at the supermarket.
I have, in the past, made my own crumpets, and while they were a novelty, they were not better than a pack of Warburton’s. I tend to think more or less the same about bread. Not quite the same, because I do occasionally make bread, and I quite enjoy the process, but I’m not kidding myself: a nice crusty bloomer from the supermarket seems fine to me, and there’s nothing to beat a fresh baguette from the boulangerie in France.
Talking of which, I’ve had a go at making my own baguette this week (for reasons). I found a three-day recipe on YouTube, and I’ve followed it fairly closely. I’ve even, ahem, bought myself a linen cloth for the bit where you shape the dough. I haven’t got this far yet, but I already know I’ll fail at shaping the loaves properly. The pros make it look so easy, but my hands lack the dexterity to shape loaves and rolls. I’ve always been a bit rubbish at it. Dough seems to stick to my hands in a way that it doesn’t for these experts. It never does what I want it to do. And when it comes to something as simple as the razor blade slash, I’m hopeless. There will be the loaf, there will I be with a brand new blade. And in comes the slash: nope.
And this is the thought behind my refusal to tackle home made pasta. Whatever the shape, I’ll just make a mess of it. And then when it cooks I’ll just think I might as well have stuck to the dried stuff.
The Night Agent (Netflix) is a kind of mid-range drama. The usual criticisms of 2023 television apply. It’s too dark! As I said to a friend, more people would surely complain about this if they weren’t second-screening all the time. It has become a bad joke that modern TV is too dark. I do wonder when in the production process this decision is made. Is it the camera operator? Are they seeing something different through their viewfinder? Or is it happening during the grading and mastering process? In the edit suite? Is someone physically turning up the dark to the maximum? If so, I’d like to know why. The only conclusion you can draw is that a kind of collective stupidity has taken over the entire industry. Why bother spending money on set design and costume when you can just make the screen pitch dark?
As to the show itself, it’s all right. Unattractive square jawed lead actor, fine. You can tell where the budget runs out with some of the minor roles: people who deliver slightly off key performances. You don’t know who to trust, fairly typical. Twists and turns. By episode 6, they’ve run out of story so they throw in a Shocking Moment (which is not a shock) and string it out for four more episodes. I kept watching (or half-watching) till the end, though. Three stars. Which means, all right if you like that kind of thing.
Daisy Jones and the Six (Amazon) ended up being okay. Less dark, for the most part. As I said, the music was a bit average, so it was hard to believe in this supposedly amazing band. And it got repetitive and predictable because of the hoary old rock clichés. I liked the ending, which I’m going to call The Mary McCartney Moment.
Season 3 of Star Trek Picard (Amazon in the UK) is also okay. A lot of fuss concerning the return of the TNG cast. Fine. Whatever. They all look weird, especially the ones who have been under the knife. The plot is the usual fare. Massive threat, super weapon, whatever. O for the days of weird costumes and stories about free love. It’s better than its previous seasons, but of course the lighting budget has been slashed since the Original Series days. Because I’m not very engaged with it (see what I did there?), I have missed most of the Easter Eggs. Good. People should stop it with the fan service.
Talking of fan service, The Last of Us (Now) was… okay. Not as good as fans of the game thought, but watchable enough. Too dark, but that goes without saying.
The best thing* on Now TV right now is, of course, The Rookie, which is a network cop show with its heart in the right place. I actually look forward to this more than anything else on TV at the moment. The Rookie: Feds is less successful, but watchable enough. Nathan Fillion should get an award for his services to mainstream TV.
Extrapolations (TV+) is just plain bad, I’m afraid. It wants to say something about climate disaster, but it does so by trying to make us care about the wrong things. Florida is sinking? Well, good. And a synagogue is under threat? Shrug. Same reaction to all places of worship: don’t give a shit. And it’s all so very disastrous, climate-wise, that you just end up throwing your hands up. For example, an episode all about how they’re lying to the last sperm whale about there being any other whales left alive, is so completely depressing you end up feeling as suicidal as the whale. And, with all of this stuff, what am I supposed to do about it? Pretending that individuals with their small changes in lifestyle can make one iota of difference when the 1% are plundering the planet. Stop building big fucking cars etc.
Ted Lasso is back too, for its third and probably final season. All pleasant and correct. Still watchable, not no longer the surprise it was in season one, so it’s just okay now.
*No, I won’t be watching Succession. Frankly, the media’s obsession with this show is all about their bubble, and the outsized influence of the moustache twirling villain Murdoch. As with all these shows about horrible rich people, I don’t need it. I already hate rich people. And as a columnist the the Guardian points out, these narratives about how miserable rich people are seem to function as a kind of safety valve for the misery they put the rest of us through. Instead of watching shows in which actors pretend to be unhappy rich people, we should try to make actual rich people as unhappy as possible.
As mentioned a while ago, I’ve been pushing myself to listen to more music this year, because I really neglected it last year. So I’ve been hitting the Apple Music and the YouTube quite frequently. YouTube tends to be for playing individual tracks, and gets irritating after a while because you spend more time scrolling through than actually listening. Plus, ads. Apple Music, I’ve been alternating between playlists and records. It’s a long time since I curated my on-the-move alphabetical playlist, but I’ve got a few I turn to. My Sinatra playlist for marking books, my Hiss Golden Messenger for lowering my heart rate, my Eric Church because I love Eric Church.
I recently made a playlist of songs written by Matraca Berg, who is one of the greatest songsmiths in modern country music. You can go back to the 90s for a lot of her best stuff; that’s mainly because she was on a hot streak and hot streaks feed themselves, because top artists go to you to record your songs. Then when the fashions change (and IN PARTICULAR) country radio decides to stop playing women artists, it all fades away. But Matraca Berg’s hot streak is something else, from Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine” to Trisha Yearwood’s “XXXs and OOOs” or “Everybody Knows” to Martina McBride’s “Cry on the Shoulder of the Road” or Patti Loveless’ “You Can Feel Bad (If It Makes You Feel Better)” – just the titles alone can be genius.
I mentioned before the latest Dierks Bentley album, Gravel and Gold, which I’ve given a few more virtual spins. I Really like it a lot, especially the songs “Sun Sets in Colorado” and “Cowboy Boots”. This latter features Ashley McBryde on vocals, and her most recent album, Lindeville is still current (came out late last year). Lindeville is a concept album, complete with short radio ads reminiscent of The Who Sell Out. It’s all about small town life, gossip, with several guest vocals, including Caylee Hammack and Pillbox Patti on the standout “Brenda Put Your Bra On”, and Benjy Davis on “Gospel Night at the Strip Club”. Brandy Clark shows up on “If These Dogs Could Talk”.
McBryde, Clark, and the other Brandi, Carlile, represent the great trifecta of gay women in country/rock at the moment, and it’s fitting that the two Brandi/ys have collaborated on Clark’s eponymous forthcoming album. The track “Buried” is out now. Consider these lyrics:
If you don’t want me If you’re beyond me If you don’t love me anymore I’ll be an over-you achiever I’ll make you a believer That I don’t love you either I’ll meet somebody else Probably get married I’ll keep it to myself But I’ll love you ’til I’m buried
I should add, as a side note, that I am all in on these gay women in country. In an America in which school heads can be fired because students were shown pictures of Michelangelo’s David, I think to release records with tracks like “Brenda Put Your Bra On” and “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” is both brave and necessary. None of them need me, but I love them. Brandi Carlile in particular is basically the President of the music world at the moment.
Tim McGraw has a new single out, “Standing Room Only”, which is excellent, and reassuringly sounds just like a Tim McGraw record. It has been a long time, so it’s good to hear his voice again. Looking forward to the album which I hope will follow.
Which brings us to my last pick, Stoned Cold Country, which is a Country tribute to the Rolling Stones, to celebrate their 60th anniversary. Fourteen tracks, no surprises. Not even a “Far Away Eyes” or “Hand of Fate”, the songs covered by a variety of artists are pretty much the first 14 any Stones fan might name. Give or take “Satisfaction” (Ashley McBride) and “Paint it Black” (Zac Brown Band), the chosen songs were released in the Stones’ Golden Age, between Brian Jones and Ronnie Wood. What was the magic ingredient that made them so great in that era, I wonder? *cough*Mick Taylor*cough*
Honky Tonk Women, Dead Flowers, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It), Tumbling Dice, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, Wild Horses, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Sympathy for the Devil, Angie, Gimme Shelter, and Shine a Light all come from that interregnum, and although Mick Taylor wasn’t on all of them, it’s a pretty tight period of time. The only one from after this era on the album is “Miss You”. Huh. Not even “Beast of Burden”, huh.
But here’s the thing. Most of these cover versions stick pretty close to the original arrangements, if not the instrumentation. Little Big Town make their harmonies work really well on “Wild Horses”, and you can imagine it would go down a storm, along with their Fleetwood Mac covers, in concert. Eric Church also makes an effort to do something different with “Gimme Shelter”. But the rest of it seems fairly pointless. The best you can say is that it sends you back to the original.
Take “Shine a Light”. I mean. The original is so transcendent that even the Stones themselves can’t cover it. Mick Taylor’s solo on it is so fluid, so perfect, so beautiful, and neither Keef not Ronnie Wood are capable of even getting close to it.
Another shortish episode. It’s Friday night. Here’s the link to the episode on Apple Podcasts.
The local music scene. Probably my first ever gig was to go and see my future brother-in-law and his band, Toad the Wet Sprocket, in a back room at the Halfway House, on the border between Dunstable and Luton. I think this pre-dated my first proper gig, the ELO at Wembley Arena. The local scene, though: does it still exist? I’ve had many a pub night ruined by some clown with a bunch of pedals and a beat box, but I’m talking about going to see a proper local band. Toad the Wet Sprocket were a hard rock riff-based band, somewhat connected to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. At least two of them were very talented musicians. I know this because they later played with me in my band, for the short space of time I was able to overcome my stage fright and get on the stage.
We were called Go, Dog. Go! I was the lead singer and songwriter and also the weakest link, the one who couldn’t really play very well and definitely couldn’t improvise. We played a few places. Sometimes half empty, sometimes half full. Our best gigs were at a pub called the Bull in Stony Stratford. We played there three times, I think, and a couple of places around Luton, St. Albans… I’ve blanked a lot of it out.
I never did play a place that was a hangout for bikers, but my friend Roger did, and had to leave in a hurry when the right-wing bikers got wind of his leftist sentiments. Hilarious. I guess you haven’t lived, as a musician, unless you’ve been chased down the street by bikers.
My worst stage experience was at a nightclub in Bletchley: a completely unsuitable venue for my whimsical material (biggest influence probably Jonathan Richman). I started very nervous, completely unable to pitch my voice correctly. And then when I’d just about calmed down, a bloke walked on the stage and shouted in my ear, “MY SISTER FANCIES YOU!” I was mortified, terrified, deep fried.
And my coolest moment came at one of those Stony Stratford gigs. The other guys started improvising at the end of “All Along the Watchtower” (was it?). I was totally lost, so I put my guitar down while they were still playing and strolled across to the bar to order a drink. The crowd parted before me like the Red Sea. So here’s episode 5, which is only an episode because Chapter 4 was getting too long.
Ronnie’s band play a successful gig to a packed house at The Crown. The “two Mels” are both in attendance…
Housekeeping & links
If you’re impatient to read ahead, I’ve published a revised ebook of The Obald:
I have also revised and updated the paperback edition, which is now live. Unfortunately, this print-on-demand stuff ends up being expensive. I tried to make a nice book, a nice thing to have. You can see an example of a page spread below. Anyway, here’s a link to the UK store for the paperback, and the same for the US store.
A long time ago, I made a list of gigs I’d been to. Not that many, because I hate going out, lol, but there was a peak period in my 20s when I went to a lot. Looking down that list now, there could be a couple of updates. Jason Isbell needs to be added; I think the Jonathan Richman number is up to (9) now, and Springsteen is up to (4). I saw a gig listing for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes the other day, and I had a little wistful moment, but no. My most recent gig-going experiences have been somewhat ruined by Other People Who Are Terrible. I won’t rehearse those complaints here.
But which was the best?
I think big stadium gigs are always horrible, so it’ll never be Springsteen. Bob Dylan is always mostly terrible. Tom Petty, Tim McGraw and Brad Paisley vie for the prize as far as concert hall sized venues are concerned. But really, the best gigs are the ones in small sweaty clubs in the days before people decided (a) to talk throughout the concert, and (b) to constantly walk back and forth to the bar. Believe or not, these things never used to happen.
So I’m narrowing it down. Tift Merritt was never bad. Birmingham Symphony Hall for Jason Isbell and Trisha Yearwood was great. But the best gigs of all were probably in the Town and Country Club, and there are three that standout: Jonathan Richman, the time he had a couple of other musicians with him (one playing a lone snare, the other on guitar); Dwight Yoakam, up close and personal, truly exciting. But the winner, the knock-your-socks-off, blow-your-face-off, best ever gig was Maria McKee at the Town and Country. The voice.
You go in expecting something like the records, the Lone Justice, the first solo. But then you hear what her voice can actually do, outside the studio, beyond the limits of technology. Just the soaring power of the human voice. I imagine Brandy Carlile’s voice has a similar power, but Maria McKee sticks in my memory, never to be forgotten.
There seems to have been a rash of science fiction books featuring octopuses just lately, with at least one nominated for a Nebula (The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler). Not sure I can see the appeal, myself.
I could just about cope with the uplifted spiders in Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s far future space opera about the scattered remnants of humanity and what became of them. But I waited a long time before getting around to the second in the series, Children of Ruin.
And now the uplifted spiders and their Human friends are exploring the galaxy and come across a system where humans tried to settle and failed, leaving a chaotic legacy behind in the form of uplifted octopuses and… something else.
And it’s at this point that I check out of the series and lose interest. It might not have been so bad, but this book is so very, very long (576 print pages) and quite honestly, there just is not 576 pages worth of plot. So it gets very repetitive and becomes a massive drag. It takes a good couple of hundred pages to set everything up, but by this time I was bored with it.
I read it to the end out of sheer stubbornness, since I’d read so far that to turn back would have been as tedious as going on. But by the end I was completely disenchanted with this series, and I’ll skip the last one (Children of Memory), even though it comes in at a mere 496 pages.
I wouldn’t mind the length if it was packed full of plot and I cared about the protagonists, but somehow the vast scale (in both space and time) of this is just off-putting, and neither the spiders nor the octopuses are particularly interesting to me.
From last week’s shorter one, we now have a longer one.
The theme of this chapter/episode is that your past will come back to haunt you. There’s the link to the episode on Apple Podcasts and below is the director’s commentary:
I once worked with someone who was so concerned people might look through his desk when he was away from it that he took all his annual leave in half days. And because he was a old-timer, he’d qualified (by the time I knew him) for 30 (or was it 35?) days’ holiday in a calendar year. I think there were days held over from a previous year (you could do that, if you were planning a trip to the antipodes, or a honeymoon etc.), so it probably was 35 days. In half days. Furthermore, he would stay at his desk until 2pm on the days he had off, so that there were only 2-3 hours in any given day when most people were around to hunt through all the files he kept on his desk.
This pathology was allowed to pass. These days, I suspect he’d be pulled aside by the HR person and offered counselling, or forced to take a couple of weeks off, or something. What actually happened back then, one of the managers lost patience one afternoon and instructed two of the filing clerks to go through everything on his desk and make a list of what was being kept there.
Missing files!
In Chapter 4, Ronnie is worrying at the edges of the problem, just not quite able to see the big picture. Back in the 80s, you could triangulate protests around Greenham Common (anti-Cruise), CND in general, and those asking awkward questions about the Falklands war, relating in particular to the sinking of the Argentinian battle cruiser General Belgrano. In 1984, a civil servant called Clive Ponting leaked documents about that incident to a Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, who was asking questions under Parliamentary Privilege. Ponting was prosecuted – and acquitted! This in spite of a technical breach of the Official Secrets Act. Before that, in May 1983, a schoolteacher named Diana Gould had tackled Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the same issue – on live TV.
When I joined the Civil Service, in 1982, I had to sign the same Official Secrets Act. Someone said to me that I would be breaching it even if I revealed, say, the colour of the carpets in the office.
Gould died in 2011, Dalyell in 2017 and Ponting in 2020, but another activist (and anti-nuclear campaigner) was murdered. Hilda Murrell was abducted from the Shrewsbury home and discovered a few days later in nearby woodland. Murrell was a vocal opponent of the Sizewell B nuclear reactor, and there were rumours that MI5 had been involved in her killing.
All of this was in my mind when I wrote The Obald, and these are the issues Ronnie keeps stumbling across. There’s a list partway through the chapter: Belgrano, Belgrano, CND, Sizewell, 1981 riots, CND, CND, Pro-Life, Greenham, NUM, IRA, Greenpeace…
There’s a certain tendency among the authoritarian right to see all those things as equivalent. In other words, anti-nuclear protestors and striking coal miners are the same as paramilitaries. So you get people like Clarkson “joking” that striking workers should be shot.
In the end, they get you not because they get you, but because the fear and paranoia takes hold and you start to censor yourself. I was a keen trade unionist and activist, but then the course of my life was diverted by being blacklisted. Since becoming a teacher, I’ve steadfastly avoided getting involved in union activism. My feeling was, the membership are happy to let you put your neck on the line, but they’ll not lift a finger when they come for you. If you’re going to be a representative, then represent. In my case, I decided that I only represent myself: nobody else cares. When people suggest I ought to be the rep, I just tell them that I’m basically a communist. It’s not really true, but they get the idea that my opinions don’t align with theirs.
And the Toffo belt buckle? It was real.
Ronnie tries to triangulate the information being collected by his employers on protestors, letter writers and petition signatories, none of whom appear to have broken any laws. Dave Cooper shares his philosophy on youthful idealism. A meeting is called at work to flag up a supposed terrorist cookbook in circulation. With his mind mostly occupied by tonight’s gig at the Crown, Ronnie bumps into someone.
Some housekeeping:
If you’re impatient to read ahead, I’ve published a revised ebook of The Obald:
I have also revised and updated the paperback edition, which is now live. Unfortunately, this print-on-demand stuff ends up being expensive. I tried to make a nice book, a nice thing to have. You can see an example of a page spread below. Anyway, here’s a link to the UK store for the paperback, and the same for the US store.
So I’m avoiding all the mind how you go jokes and the so farewell then headlines. I wonder how many people are even aware of E J Thribb? I suppose if you work in the medja.
I’ve been thinking about Endeavour. It was so very good. I said ages ago that it was better than Morse, and I think it would be a harsh critic who wouldn’t acknowledge it so. As I wrote recently, Morse itself seems a bit weird now, more of a sketch than a fully realised artwork.
But that last episode? In fact the whole of the last series? It was good, and welcome, but… well. Don’t read on if you have not seen the final three episodes.
Before I start a word on length. Look away now if you don’t like thinking how everything is a little worse now than it used to be. Old man alert!
Episodes of Endeavour are 10 minutes shorter than episodes of Morse, but they fit in the same time slot. Yes, there are now 10 minutes more adverts than there were in the 80s and 90s. And as anyone who has watched recent ITV or Channel 4 will know, there are fewer adverts, shown more often, so you don’t even get variety. All the adverts are for river cruises and funerals, as far as I can make out.
Luckily, I’ve been subscribing to ITVX so I can avoid the ad breaks while watching Paris-Nice highlights and episodes of Endeavour. I did watch the first of the season live, but will not make that mistake again.
So the show is better but the experience is worse, is what I’m saying. And then there were the last three episodes.
First of all, let’s talk retcon. I think Endeavour has fallen victim to retroactive continuity. This didn’t feel like Thursday’s past coming back to haunt him so much as, how can we create a situation whereby Morse never speaks of him again? So levers were pulled, and furniture was moved, and it all felt a little creaky. So his brother didn’t lose all his money but pretended to so that the gangsters could hold something over Thursday should they ever need to? What? It doesn’t make sense. It would make more sense if his brother had given him a return-on-investment that turned out in the fullness of time to be dirty money. But no, because they couldn’t go back that far.
So then there’s the COINCIDENCE KLAXON of the dead biker being the missing boy from the children’s home, only with a different name, yadda yadda. The 19th rule of Pixar storytelling has some thoughts about coincidence, and so do I. Although this coincidence didn’t get Thursday or Morse out of trouble, it certainly solved a problem for the writers. There was this kid, and he went away and changed his name and he came back to Oxford of all places because…?
Things fall apart.
But I did like the plotlines of the penultimate two episodes, the murder-of-the-week stories. Because the second episode took aim at the £20 note burners of the Bullingdon Club, and the third created a killer who was basically a Brexit Bigot from 50 years ago, murdering people simply for having opinions he didn’t like. So it was like The Nasty Party writ large.
They may not be Nazis*, but they are nasty.
Which brings us to the finale and the falling out. I would have bought guilt as a reason for Morse’s silence. If Morse’s actions had got, say, Thursday and Joan both killed, it would explain his silence (guilt) and Chief Superintendent Strange’s antipathy towards Morse in Morse.
But the showrunners didn’t quite have the gumption to kill off Thursday, and they married Joan off to Strange, which might explain why Morse hates Strange, but not the other way around. They teased a death for Thursday (in the same spot that Morse died, which is cheesy), but they didn’t go through with it.
Instead, they had Thursday be the murderer of the biker, and Morse knew it and confronted him about it and… nothing. Actually, the falling out wasn’t even a proper falling out. They parted as friends. Sure, Thursday was going to make himself scarce, but there was no sense in which Morse was so thoroughly disillusioned with him that he could no longer bear to speak his name.
Nope. Not buying it.
As for the gun. As for the discharge of a fire arm in a church yard, off camera, well, what? It was all a dream? A suicide deferred? I don’t get it, and I don’t think anybody else does either. And don’t bother reading any of those “ending explained” articles. I suspect they’re written by AIs and they explain nothing. Ever.
In the end, I loved it, except for the bits that were put in as fan service and the retconning in an attempt to explain Morse’s silence. Why not have him actually turn Thursday in for murder? That would be a classic detective move. To paraphrase Dashiell Hammett:
When someone’s son is killed you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was somebody’s son and you’re supposed to do something about it. It’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around-bad for the organisation, bad for every detective everywhere.
The Maltese Falcon
So it seems to me that would have been the way to go. It doesn’t matter what the fans think. The character has to be true to himself. And if Morse had arrested Thursday, it would have been a shocker, but in character. And it would have explained his ongoing silence on the subject. And Strange’s attitude to him.
I’ll finish on a positive. Because I did love the show. The whole cast was brilliant, but I must say a special word for Anton Lesser. I fucking love Anton Lesser. And in that last episode, when he said his farewell to the squad, talking about what a privilege it had been etc., I absolutely welled up. Fifteen words, by my count. Fifteen words is all he needed, and I was wrecked.
A shorter episode this week, because some chapters are longer and some are shorter. And that’s the way it is with a true Spaniard.
I considered bolting chapter 3 onto either chapter 2 or 4, but then you end up with a super-long episode, which I decided was too much to ask of my listener.
This chapter was driven by memories of going to work with a hangover after hitting the cocktails the night before. There was a bit of a cocktail craze in the 80s, and there was a range of ready-mixed drinks in silver bottles. My favourite was the Sundowner, which according to Difford’s Guide is made with Cognac, Grand Marnier, and orange juice, but I seem to remember the one I had was rum-based, with grenadine. It’s a puzzle, because in my mind the name “Sundowner” evokes a layered drink of orange and red, to mirror the sky at sunset. According to this article on Mr Porter, you can make something called an El Presidente, with rum, vermouth, and grenadine. Who knows? All I really know is, they were very strong, and they made me very, very sick.
So there was indeed one night when I vomited two or three times before getting on the bus, then a couple more times when I got home (such control! no parking the tiger on the bus!) and then a couple more times the morning after, including after I’d got to work. Such a head! My god, the memory of it sticks with me, lo these 40 years later.
The other thing driving this chapter: late night phone calls. I’m a lifelong telephobic, so the occasions when I’ve conducted any kind of relationship over the phone have been few and far between. When I worked in an office, my phone was permanently set to voicemail. I’d listen to the messages and call people back if I absolutely had to. But when it comes to personal relations, nope. Mostly. Except for a couple of exceptions, both slightly different.
The late night caller was an early girlfriend. It was a fraught relationship, short-lived, but with a long afterlife. And it was in the afterlife that the late night calls would happen. In the witching hour, when your resistance is low: in terms of both making and receiving the call. And even then: long, drawn-out silences. Pent up words.
So here we are then, a short one: Ronnie wakes with a bad hangover but nevertheless drags himself into work. He sets out to find his mystery girl on the system, and in spite of his qualms finds himself warming to Mel.
McMinn & Cheese 