"Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories".- Villains who have inspired me

Major spoilers for Die Hard, The Matrix and Blackadder


In an earlier blog I picked three characters from films that were a big inspiration to me, to the person I wanted to become - they were Westley/The Man In Black from The Princess Bride, T.E Lawrence from Lawrence of Arabia and Gustav H from The Grand Budapest Hotel. These three are the heroes of their films and with the recent death of Alan Rickman I put some thought into if there might be villains who were equally inspiring.


Hans Gruber  - Die Hard

The benefits of a classical education

Alan Rickman was a great actor and had a career that gave him a chance to play every sort of role but for me, and for many others, his best role was as German criminal mastermind Hans Gruber in Die Hard. It may not have been Austen or Shakespeare but Die Hard was a great film, but it was a great film with a terrible flaw, the villain was so much better than the hero. Every time I watch it I'm on the side of the articulate, well-dressed and composed European, not the frantic New York cop running around with no shoes on. For those who don't know in the film Die Hard a group of mainly European criminals take over the Nakatomi building and hold the staff hostage. They are professional, well-prepared and know exactly what they are doing. At first it seemed that these men were terrorists, wanting the release of fellow terrorists but actually they were planning on stealing the millions of dollars in the building. Their plan was thwarted by John McClane, the estranged husband of a high-ranking employee, who was also a cop back home in New York. The criminals were lead by Rickman's Hans Gruber, the most effete criminal mastermind this side of Raffles the Gentleman Thief.

Certainly if I was to be a movie villain I'd be more Hans Gruber and less Scarface or Hannibal Lector. McClane doesn't think much of Gruber seeing him as little more than an ambitious bank robber but I think McClane has underestimated him. The safe they are trying to break into is protected by electronic locks that they can't disable and throughout the first half of the film this was presented as an unsolvable problem but Gruber has thought about this. When McClane managed to alert the local authorities of the hostage situation, Gruber didn't really care, this was because his plan was centred on the police being made aware - why? Because in a hostage situation the FBI would follow procedure and cut the power. Gruber had the FBI do what was impossible for him to do, turn off the electronic locks. For all that he is the villain of the film Gruber is not even the most unpleasant person in the film, that honour fell to the coked up businessman douchebag Harry Ellis, a thoroughly terrible person and a pastiche of 1980s businessman/executive cliches. There is also the hideous news presenter who through sheer stupidity almost caused the death of McClane's wife. True neither Ellis nor the news presenter killed anyone but they were self-serving idiots who didn't care what happened to other people - at least Gruber was more up front about it.

What I took from Hans Gruber whatever you're doing it never hurts to be well-dressed and well-read.

Agent Smith - The Matrix

"Mr. Anderson"

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I don't think being in the matrix is all that bad, certainly a lot better than many movie alternatives. But admittedly the agents who helped control that world were a pretty ruthless bunch. Seemingly the leader of the agents was Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith. Of all the unflappable, calm and in control agents he is the most unflappable, most calm and most in control. Hugo Weaving does an excellent job playing Agent Smith and before it was explained exactly what he was it's clear he wasn't a normal human just from the way he acted. I am a big fan of Hugo Weaving and that started with this film and a lot of it was based on the way he said "Mr. Anderson" the name of Keanu Reeve's character. He spoke in a dull monotone but still managed to convey contempt and disgust. Agent Smith's best moment was when after getting in a fight with Keanu Reeves he was hit by a subway train. The train screeched to a sudden stop and a second later Agent Smith stepped out of the train unscathed having taken over another body and still looking entirely unfazed by the entire incident - like I said, unflappable.

Agent Smith was cold, emotionally distant, rational - aside from the occasional rant about how he hated living in the Matrix, he took his time and spoke calmly. He wore a simple black suit unlike the over the top leather coats and sunglasses the humans wore. Agent Smith looked like someone in control, his movements were measured and precise. The humans were obsessed with all this mystical nonsense about finding "the One" but unsurprisingly the agents had more straightforward and concrete plans. There is an admirable amount of dedication in Agent Smith (and yes in the film he's the "bad guy" but the humans and robots are fighting a war of survival and the humans blocked out the sun so maybe they're not the "good guys") for example at the end of the film when it has been demonstrated that nothing they can do can kill Neo he stands his ground.


Edmund Blackadder - Blackadder

Edmund Blackadder shooting a pigeon...scarcely a court martial offence

I have loved the tv show Blackadder for a long long time. In the dark days when it was prohibitively expensive and space consuming to own all your favourite shows I had a single tape of Blackadder -the first three episodes of the fourth series - Blackadder Goes Forth, the World War I years, and I watched it over and over again. The star of Blackadder was Edmund Blackadder and each series took on a different time period and a different Edmund Blackadder. The first series was the uneven and least loved War of the Roses era Blackadder, with Edmund being the unloved and useless second son of the king, the second series was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, or Queenie as she is known in the show, and Lord Blackadder is a member of the court. Series three was set in Regency England Blackadder is the butler for the Prince Regent. The last series is set during World War I and Edmund is now a professional soldier who doesn't much like soldiering.

The character was transformed between series one and two from the stupid and useless but hungry for power fool to the charming and fiendishly clever courtier and it was the latter Edmund that I liked so much. Edmund Blackadder wasn't just clever and funny, he was witty, he always the knew the right thing to say and outwitted all those around him. The clever Blackadder is surrounded by idiots and he relies only on his cunning to survive and prosper. This is of greatest importance during World War I when those idiots are very keen on sending thousands of soldiers to their deaths on a daily basis. Blackadder's despair at the handling of the war is summed up by him declaring it was  "a war which would be a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot fifty thousand of our men a week" and the scary thing was  that was probably right. In series two and three Blackadder had been a cad and a rogue but in series four he was battling the insanity of the First World War and it is hard not to be on his side. My favourite book is probably Catch 22 and what Joseph Heller did in that book - show that war was not only Hell but it was ridiculous - the writers of Blackadder did in that series.

Of course in Blackadder we are supposed to be on his side, in that sense he is not too much of a villain at the same time he does do a lot of terrible things - murder, blackmail, theft, assault and many of these cruel acts are against blameless people. Even when picking on the harmless Baldrick we laugh and feel little sympathy for him. When Rick Mayall turned up in Blackadder Goes Forth as the heroic Lord Flashheart we still want Blackadder to come out on top. Flashheart is over the top, loud, and has no self-deprecation, not traits to endear him to the British public. We much prefer the sarcastic smart alec always insulting people.

So for my three villainous heroes I have a well-dressed German bank robber, an emotionally devoid computer programme and a cowardly and devious wit. The one characteristic they all share is being good with words - even Agent Smith has great lines- and while I didn't have that in mind when I picked them it is certainly a trait I really admire.

Mavericks: The Rules Were Not Made To Be Broken

Spoiler Warning - Major spoilers for The Shield, L.A. Confidential
Minor spoilers for House, Hot Fuzz

In one episode of House a mean hospital administrator guy tried to get House kicked out of the hospital. It was made clear with camera angles and emotive music that he was most definitely the bad guy. And before the hospital board he put forward his case - House was a drug addict, House not only broke ethical guidelines he broke the law, he refused to do things that were his job, he insulted other staff and patients and I quickly found myself agreeing with him; House should be fired. There were others on the board who tried to put forward a case for House, stating that he was singularly brilliant and did things no one else could do but they had a pretty weak case. Ultimately though House was impervious to this, because he was a maverick, and television loves mavericks. House is a genius who doesn't play by the rules! As with most jobs, but especially medicine, the rules are there for a very good reason and while people idolise mavericks on television I think most people would be uncomfortable if they had a maverick GP who didn't play by the rules.

Mavericks are a very common trope in films and television, they are exciting, unpredictable characters, who do things their real-life counterparts couldn't do (often this is for very good reasons). Many mavericks are abrasive and rude and have poor people skills, they have substance abuse problems and have problems dealing with authority, despite often working in areas with very rigid authority structures.  The Fast Show played with this trope with adverts for a new programme called Monkfish which constantly showed a tough, uncompromising, belligerent maverick who morphed from police officer to doctor to vet in each new version of the show

Medicine is a curious field to want mavericks, given the years they spend learning the rules and procedures, but it is a fictional phenomenon that extends to many other careers. The most obvious is with the police and just about every fictional police officer from Dirty Harry to DCI John Luther were a law unto themselves and their films and shows make the argument that as they are on the side of righteousness, it's okay to break the law.

• Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry one of the earliest examples and often cited as the classic example of the maverick cop. The careful and considerate Sarah Lund, the main police officer in The Killing who doesn't even carry her gun is a million miles from Callahan, who goaded criminals into using their guns so he could kill them.
• Bud White, L.A. Confidential, uses violence and intimidation to get what he considers justice and is then used by the corrupt police chief to beat up his criminal competitors.
• Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle, The French Connection, was far more dangerous to members of the public than many criminals by his insane car chases.

• Gene Hunt, Life On Mars, the stereotypical 1970s policeman, very happy to frame people he doesn't like and no time for any woolly liberal ideas. Hunt is an odd case as he is only a maverick in  comparison with John Simm's modern Sam Tyler.
• Axel Foley, Beverley Hills Cop, does not take police work at all seriously.
• Martin Riggs, Lethal Weapon, a loose cannon with a deathwish.
• Vic Mackay, The Shield, in the first episode he murdered in cold blood another police officer so his side business of being a drug kingpin wasn't uncovered.

Some of these films and shows do criticise the maverick cops - Vic Mackay in The Shield is shown as absolutely corrupt and every season he seems to get into even murkier water, Gene Hunt is the exemplar throwback to dodgy police officers of the past whose reckless ways lead to innocent people ending up in prison and Bud White's tendency to ignore the rules made him easy prey for  a manipulative superior.

Mavericks in the military seem to be rarer and often depictions of soldiers etc. punish the idea of a maverick, you wouldn't want to be the maverick in the training part of Full Metal Jacket. However, in Top Gun Tom Cruise's character had the call-sign of "Maverick" to really emphasis his unpredictable maverick credentials. I definitely don't want a maverick in charge of a multi-million dollar flying killing machine. If we're going to have flying killing machines at all then I want level headed unadventurous types at the controls. That said, virtually the entire cast of Top Gun shouldn't be allowed near weapons, so obsessed with proving their superiority over  others and treating the whole thing like a very fun game.

The completely unreliable pilots of Top Gun

I've never really identified with maverick characters as usually I could see why the rules existed. They are few and far between but I much prefer anti-mavericks, these are people who can follow rules, work in teams, have good manners but are also very good at their jobs. When an anti-maverick appears in fiction there dedication to  doing their job properly is made into an interesting character quirk, rather than what you would expect. There are two perfect examples of these anti-mavericks.  The first is my favourite fictional depiction of a police officer, Nicolas Angel played by Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz and he is the quintessential anti-maverick.

 Angel was a brilliant police officer; intelligent, dedicated, incorruptible, who trained and studied hard, who understood both the letter and the intent of a law. He did his paperwork and he understood the importance of paperwork. He was not a maverick. He didn't break the rules. At one point in the film when giving a speech to schoolchildren he cited the importance of procedural correctness when enforcing the law. Angel was the perfect police officer. Angel's partner, Danny Butterman, was more interested in the over the top antics of maverick police officers in films like Bad Boys where any arrest those two actually made would be challenged by any lawyer for the litany of things they did wrong. In films police officers see themselves as being the one "who cleans the garbage off the streets" whereas Angel is commended for building positive links with the community. Best of all, Angel is a police officer who while trained to use guns, and has used them, does not like them. He is a very un-macho example of a police officer.

The other brilliant example of an anti-maverick is Amy Poehler's character Leslie Knope in Parks & Recreation. She actually had many of the same problems as Hot Fuzz's Nicolas Angel - fantastically good at her job, liked following the rules and struggled to coexist with colleagues who didn't share her level of commitment and brilliance. The idea of making Leslie brilliant at her job, and actually brilliant at most things she set her mind to, wasn't apparent at the beginning of the show and at first she was just weirdly obsessed about her job and her burgeoning greatness made the character make far more sense. It also changed Knope from somebody who could be pitied into someone who was impressive.

Sadly, I don't think my anti-mavericks will take off in quite the same way as their more rule averse colleagues as without the brilliant writers and actors behind Hot Fuzz and Parks and Recreation they could be a little boring.

Review of the Year

Spoiler Warning - Star Wars: The Force Awakens - not really any spoilers but I do mention who plays one character and that might trouble some people.


So it's the end of the year and while I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions I do believe in making arbitrary decisions about what has been the best whatever of the year. By the way, when I say "of the year" I'm referring to stuff I discovered in 2015 as from a philosophical point of view I can't guarantee that any of this stuff actually existed before I experienced it.

Best Thing of the Year - including television, film, books, podcasts etc
Winner: Rick and Morty It has so much in it that would appeal to me; science, time travel, parallel universes, shockingly unsentimental and cynical characters and it is very, very funny. A line of dialogue has become my new personal motto:

"Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV"

This is not as bleak as it sounds and actually came as very welcome advice in the show. I don't believe that people exist on purpose or for a reason, I don't believe the universe has some grand purpose and, yes, we are all going to die and I was really happy to see this idea not presented as a nihilist gloomy philosophy but instead as a way to enjoy life.

Every episode is excellent but particular stand out episodes are Love Potion No. 9  (which explained why love potions are really not cool), Meseeks and Destroys (bringing the brilliant character of Mr. Meseeks into existence) and Total Rickall (featuring memory tampering alien parasites (a lot of episode titles are puns involving Rick's name)).

Left to Right: Morty, Rick, Beth & Summer having some quality family time

Person Who Exceeded Expectations 
Winner: Bob Odenkirk, twice.
Spin-offs and reunions have a bad track record. Spin offs usually have diminishing returns and most reunions are not worth it but Bob Odenkirk has appeared in one spinoff and one reunion and both were better than I thought they would be. The spinoff was Better Call Saul, with Odenkirk taking the Saul Goodman character from Breaking Bad and doing an origins story for him. In Better Call Saul the lawyer is still using his real name, James McGill (that Saul Goodman isn't his real was stated in Breaking Bad). At this point McGill was more or less still on the right side of the law and didn't want to get involved with drug dealers and criminals unless he was defending them in a court of law. Breaking Bad was one of the best tv shows ever made and to be honest I didn't expect much from Better Call Saul but it easily exceeded my expectations. The show has a different tone to Breaking Bad and had moments of real pathos - Mike Ehrmantraut's face-to-face with his daughter in law being particularly affecting.

The reunion was that Netflix had effectively reunited the Mr. Show team. Mr. Show was a HBO sketch show in the nineties starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross - probably best known as Tobias in Arrested Development. Their nineties show was as weird and brilliant as a HBO sketch show should be and who knew if they would be able to recapture the essence of that show. But they did and it was as surreal and great as ever.

Person Who Can Seemingly Do No Wrong
Winner - Oscar Isaac
The winner is Oscar Isaac who in 2015 appeared in gritty crime thriller A Most Violent Year, mind-bending sci-fi film Ex Machina, the critically acclaimed HBO drama Show Me a Hero and topped it off with playing Poe Dameron in the new Star Wars film, so he hasn't had a bad year really.

Oscar Isaac posing for a calendar

Best Live Comedy
Winner: Jo Neary - Faceful of Issues

At the Edinburgh Festival I saw a number of excellent comedy shows but the best was Jo Neary. It's hard to describe Jo Neary's show, I suppose you'd call her a character comedian and in a show she might play numerous characters, like her previous show Jo Neary's Youth Club or just the one character as in this show. I first saw Jo Neary as part of Robin Ince's Nine Lessons and Carols For Godless People show where one time she played an extremely nervous and uncomfortable woman doing a talk on sex toys and another where she played a character who was straight out of Brief Encounter talking on the phone. Both were brilliant. In this show Neary adopted a very similar persona of a well-spoken, perhaps repressed middle-class woman but built up the character so it was far more than just a parody. The show was something like a variety show from a small village fete and of course everyone apart from Jo Neary's character has dropped out. From start to finish it was hilarious and sometimes oddly emotional and Jo Neary's character is surprisingly endearing and was as close to a perfect hour of comedy I have ever seen. Below is a preview of the Edinburgh show she performed which I am fairly sure she is fine with being available online.

Perfectly Tailored For Me Book Award:
Winner: Nick Harkaway - Angelmaker
I read The Gone Away World little while ago and really enjoyed it but it only partly prepared me for how amazing Angelmaker would be. It really does seem like Nick Harkaway scanned my brain to determine what would be the perfect book for me. The book has so many interesting ideas - from the organisation that praised the ideas of John Ruskin so much they devoted their lives to building unique beautiful items like submarines and trains, the spy organisation who during World War II recruited rebellious young women to be spies, to the idea of a doomsday device that relied on increasing the amount of truth in the world. It is wonderfully odd and entirely to my taste.

Surprise of the Year
Winner: American Horror Story

I have never been a huge fan of horror but I have been trying to work in this over the last couple of years watching The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, The Baba Dook and similar. I also tried giving American Horror Story a go. I had initially been intrigued by the way the show works; every season the setting and premise of the show changes, they keep the same actors but people play different parts.The first season is known as "Murder House" and focused on the various deaths and murders that have happened over the decades and the various malicious ghosts who occupy the house. The first time I tried to watch it I couldn't make it through the first episode but for whatever reason I tried again and while I still wasn't too keen on the first episode but the second turned things up to eleven and I really enjoyed it which was quite a surprise. The show  is absolutely bonkers and doesn't make much sense at times but it is very enjoyable and helped me watch more horror things. After much thought I am not going to watch the second season only because it is set in an asylum and I think it might genuinely terrify me.

The Thank God It Wasn't Awful Award
Winner: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
It is far too early for me to talk too much about Star Wars and I need to have some time to properly consider the film, but whatever else I enjoyed it immensely. No matter how many good things were appearing in the news and the great trailer part of me couldn't forget the awfulness of The Phantom Menace.

So that was a selection of stuff from 2015, things I'm looking forward to in 2016 include Quentin Tarantino's new film The Hateful Eight, the new West World tv show and Ben Wheatley's film High Rise.

Christmas Pop Culture

WARNING contains spoilers for Miracle on 34th Street and very minor spoilers for one episode of Supernatural in season 3

Many people assume a cynical atheist like myself would hate Christmas but as a matter of fact I actually quite like Christmas. I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes along with Christmas, chief amongst this hatred is the music. I used to work in a supermarket that seemed to have only two Christmas albums, which is fine for the customer who would likely be done before even the first album finished. I found listening to the same twenty songs torturous. Most songs that are released in conjunction with some event are not very good and Christmas is no exception. I don't see why just because it's Christmas we should listen to bad music but that is what most musicians have given us. Over the years a number of reputable artists have released Christmas albums or the odd original song as well as a wide selection of interesting covers. Some of my favourite Christmas songs include Christmas All Over Again by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the wonderfully blasphemous Jesus the Reindeer by Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler, Get Behind Me Santa by Sufjan Stevens and Just Like Christmas by Low and they are all artists that pass my stringent criteria for being real musicians. The undisputed best Christmas song is Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love and there is an excellent cover by Slow Club. Love's original is full of emotion and her voice is absolutely outstanding and say what you like about Phil Spector he knew what he was doing when it came to music.

Matt Berry seems to have inside knowledge about what television and music I like - not content with only appearing in Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box, Toast of London, The IT Crowd and more he is also a brilliant, albeit exceedingly odd, musician. He has released four studio albums and a live album and I recommend them all (Opium is the oddest while Music for Insomniacs is very much what it says it is). In terms of  Christmas a number of year ago he made a half-hour rock opera about the Nativity but from the point of view of the relatively minor character, the innkeeper who had no room. It is thirty minutes of absolute genius and/or madness, perfect Christmas viewing and has one of the best titles of anything and really the only acceptable name for a rock opera about the birth of Jesus, AD/BC.

Julian Barratt playing Tony Iscariot

My go-to film for Christmas is Scrooged, a Christmas story with no Santa Claus or Jesus, but with Bill Murray. Murray is the perfect star for a Christmas film as he shares many of the characteristics of the two main characters associated with Christmas; he is a seemingly legendary or mythic character, known for inexplicable acts of kindness and oddness whose career seemingly died and was then resurrected and unlike them he's not imaginary. And this year Bill Murray has released a Christmas Special on Netflix! It looks like some odd comedy vehicle, rather than a genuine Christmas show (think Knowing Me Knowing Yule with Alan Partridge). Aside from Scrooged other good Christmas films are The Nightmare Before Christmas, Muppets Christmas Carol, Gremlins (but be prepared, that's a much darker film than people remember) and if you only want the mildest hint of Christmas these films are set at, but not about, Christmas; Die Hard, Batman Returns, Trading Places, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and if you're looking for something particularly dark, Terry Gilliam's dystopian masterpiece Brazil was set at Christmas. I do like Miracle on 34th Street but I am of the opinion the judge in that film made the wrong call, if I'd been the director it would have ended very differently.

The much darker than remembered Gremlins

I find myself increasingly annoyed by Russell Brand, his foray into politics was a disaster, and I am not amused by many of his recent antics. However, every so often he will do something brilliant. Sometimes it's a documentary on Jack Kerouac, or the "pound shop Enoch Powell" insult to Nigel Farage which perfectly summed him up, or him discussing what happened to his mind when he was the lead story on every news programme in the country. So he's not someone I can completely write-off and another Christmas tradition Spooky Reading Girl and  have is to watch the Christmas episode of Ponderland. This was a Brand comedy vehicle where he would do standup around a particular topic like Science or Family and it would be interspersed with archive footage of documentaries and similar cultural objects and the Christmas episode might be the best one. It is deliriously funny at times particularly a memo from a department store concerning problems with their in store Santa Claus. The description of the problems they had was funny enough and when Brand revealed the name of the fired Santa was Norbert Cleaverhook, a name for a 1970s movie serial killer and such a name should preclude any employment let alone as a store Santa Claus.

Father Ted gave us one of the best Christmas specials but more recently the Christmas episode of Peep Show has become a tradition in our house. One of the few things that Jez does believe in is Christmas and despite never really trying with anything he tried hard with Christmas; researching the perfect turkey and buying perfect presents. Mark on the other hand bought Jez salad tongs. Although when Mark's family turn up it is understandable why he has less pleasant Christmas memories than Jez. The behaviour and attitude of Mark's father explained an awful lot about Mark's insecurities.

Mark's surprisingly thoughtful Christmas presents from Jez

The final piece of Christmas entertainment is an episode of Supernatural, Season 3's A Very Supernatural Christmas, that at first seemed to be an anti-Santa monster who punished bad people but was actually a pair of jolly Christmas loving pagan demigods who also like sacrificing human beings, and so break into people's houses and carry them away in a big sack. The pair present themselves as a very respectable married couple, wholesome, polite, they even wear Christmas jumpers, which I have always assumed are only worn by the most evil of creatures. It shouldn't come as too much of a spoiler to learn that the heroes of the show killed them both.The show does remind us all that so much of our Christmas tradition has a pagan origin.

The jolly Christmas sacrifice

So here's to a Christmas full of pagan gods, nativity inspired rock operas and most of all Bill Murray.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robotic Overlords - Best and Worst Dystopias and Utopias

Major spoilers for The Matrix, Minority Report, Gattaca, Red Son.

My girlfriend, Spooking Reading Girl, once had an example essay question while she was at university which asked if Sauron and the Ring hadn't come along and spoiled everything would the Shire and the life the hobbits lead be an example of a utopia? When I saw this I thought two things. First, that would be a very boring book, and secondly, for me it would be awful. The pleasant countryside existence of the hobbits would be my idea of Hell. It's all so twee and gentle, everyone has silly names and does silly things. I would find it very tiresome.

The twee horror of The Shire

Utopias and dystopias are a favourite topic of fiction, the word utopia was first used by Sir Thomas More in his book, Utopia, in which he imagined a perfect, or at least much better society. A dystopia is a society that is much worse that ours. The most famous dystopia is probably 1984 in which George Orwell imagined a future society constantly under surveillance by secret police, fighting never-ending wars and where, effectively, facts no longer existed and they could be rewritten to suit the circumstances. Orwell based a lot of this on Stalinist Russia where history books were rewritten to show Stalin as more active in the Russian Revolution than he was and downplaying his enemies contributions. You get far fewer utopias in fiction for the main reason that they are quite boring. A genuine utopia would have no crime, no war, no conflict, what would there be to write about? Aside from perhaps More's own work the most famous utopia I can think of is the Federation in Star Trek. The Federation is a nation of many planets and different alien races working together for the betterment of society. Earth especially is pictured as peaceful, prosperous and happy. Star Trek was created during the Cold War and the idea of a future Earth where we all cooperated instead of fighting each other was the stuff of science fiction. On the bridge of the Enterprise there was mix of races and cultures, Chekov is Russian but aside from the occassional forays into time travel that detail is completely irrelevant. Perhaps most famously the Federation had no money and they have evolved some other way of allocating resources fairly. This is made very clear over the various films and tv shows and in their universe at least is seen as a very good thing.

Some dystopias aren't as bad as all that. The Matrix is a classic dystopian world in that in the film intelligent robots and computers have rebelled against their human masters and eventually use humans as a power source. Humans lie asleep in little pods while various wires and tubes carry away the energy they produce. However instead of just letting the humans scream and cry in their little pods the robots created an artificial reality for the people to live in. This reality was a representation of what the world had been like near the peak of human civilisation, more or less, the late 1990s. Humans spend their entire lives in this artificial reality unaware of what is really going on. I must say, this is very charitable of the robots as that doesn't sound too bad to me. Instead of having to live in a world virtually destroyed by the human-robot war, in which the Sun has been blocked out, they live in a much nicer world. That is far better than humans treat most cattle and livestock and if I had to choose a dystopia to live in I think I'd pick that one. Certainly these robots are far nicer that the ones in Terminator whose tactics are to completely wipe out the human race. Agent Smith in the film even says the first artificial reality they made for people was really nice, where nothing bad ever happened but that people just wouldn't accept it as real. One of the characters even made this argument in the film, he didn't care if it was artificial, it was a better existence than the one he had free of the Matrix. All I can say is that I, for one welcome our new robotic overlords. Incidentally, having watched The Matrix again recently how good is Hugo Weaving in that film? He is clearly the best person in it.

The scene stealing Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith

If we're trying to work out the worst dystopia I would argue it is Brazil. Terry Gilliam's dystopia is similar in many ways to 1984 but the sinister government isn't just evil they are actually rather incompetent. A typing error leads to the arrest of the wrong man and when he died in custody it sends ramifications through their failing system. Bureaucratic inefficiency and indifference is life threatening in this world. Surely the sign that this is the worst of all possible worlds is that Michael Palin - generally acknowledged as the nicest man in the world - played a terrifying government torturer. Any world in which Michael Palin could do these things must be a very bad place indeed.

The horrifyingly nice Michael Palin in Brazil

There are lots of examples of worlds where people think they live in a utopia but are perhaps wrong. Minority Report is a world in which psychic beings can see the future and direct the police to stop murders before they happen. A new crime is invented where the criminal can be punished for a murder they were stopped from committing. But this better future comes at a price, as it always does, and Tom Cruise played the police officer in charge of "pre-crime" who became a suspect himself. Genetic engineering is the tool in Gattaca that has lead to a world populated by beautiful, intelligent, athletic people as virtually every baby is genetically engineered. As one doctor explained at the beginning of the film, the child is still made from the parents genetics but given the best of what they have. Ethan Hawke played one of the few people to be born "naturally" and the heart defect he was born with convinced his parents that their next child should be engineered. Hawke, frustrated by the limited life his "inferior" genetics gave him he adopted the identity of another engineered person, someone whose genetics wouldn't hold them back. The fact that Hawke was not only able to match the talents of his genetic superiors but also outdo them suggested that success wasn't just down to genes. Minority Report and Gattaca both present worlds that for most people are a utopia, a world free of crime and a world of smarter, healthier and just better people but there are those at the sharp end of this utopia. In Minority Report it is the people convicted of crimes they hadn't yet committed and in Gattaca those people left to do all the menial jobs their genetically superiors don't want to do.

It's important to remember as well that not all of have the same idea of a utopia. As I found the idea of living in the Shire distinctly unappealing some people would feel the same way about the arguably communist and atheistic society set up in Star Trek. As a socialist atheist leftie I can get happily get on board with the society in the Federation but I get the feeling Donald Trump would object. I think people are now inherently suspicious of anyone touting a utopian society and in the same way that most sorts of trouble start out as fun most, dystopias start out as an attempt at utopia. There is an episode of Doctor Who called the Happiness Patrol who basically murder anyone not happy but they had good intentions when they started out, trying to make people more happy. Individual freedom is often thought of as more important than anything else. In the fantastic graphic novel Red Son, the spaceship that brought Superman to Earth crash landed in the Soviet Union, not America. So Superman is still a hero, he saves people etc, but instead of having an idea that people should be free to decide for themselves he instead has been brought up in a society where it is okay for someone to intervene and he takes over the Soviet union after Stalin's death. He will actively make the world better. And he was, in a way, successful but many people would object to him forcing a utopia on them.

Notice the Hammer and Sickle on his chest

Perhaps the problem with utopias and dystopias is if you don't agree with their vision of society you're in trouble. Margaret Atwood, an author of several dystopian novels, said that every utopia has a problem, what to do with the people who don't fit in? In Doctor Who's The Happiness Patrol they were killed, in Red Son they were labotomised, and how a society treats people who don't fit in probably defines how close they are to either the utopia or dystopia label.

The Never Ending Story of Putting Things In The Right Order

After having spent a productive morning organising my DVDs (just films, television is in a separate category) I was struck by how this relatively simple task was made far more complicated by my OCD tendencies. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (or as Tobias Funke would call it The OC Disorder) and in the past decade or so has went from a little understood condition to something very familiar in the lexicon. According to OCD-UK 1.2% of the population of the UK has OCD, which works out as around 750,000 people. OCD has become something that many people will say they have when what they probably mean is they have OCD tendencies. OCD can take many forms but is basically suffering from intrusive thoughts; to use myself as an example I can get very concerned about checking doors are locked, that I turned the oven off, that sort of thing. When I am out I will get an intrusive thought that "did I lock the door?" and I will be anxious, worried that I didn't do it and all manner of terrible things will happen because of my mistake. If I don't go back to check I will often become more and more anxious about it.

Often I get two steps from my front door and go back to check I have locked it (incidentally I always have locked it), when I check the door is locked this creates relief from anxiety which reinforces the behaviour of going back and checking so the next time I leave the house I have an even more anxious feeling and will go back and check and this perpetrates a cycle of intrusive thought-anxiety-checking behaviour-relief which constantly gets stronger and stronger I don't say I have OCD because I can get by in my life without this being too much of a problem. If I am at work and I have an intrusive thought about locking the door I don't leave work to go and check, it doesn't really interfere with my life. To people who have OCD having the intrusive thought about the door and not checking is a terrible ordeal and I am fortunate my tendencies are so easy to deal with. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith made a joke about dyslexia, or rather the way comedians portray dyslexia, which would be amusing situations would arise as the sufferer misreads a sign and goes into the wrong set of toilets or whatever. Goldsmith pointed out that this is not what dyslexia is but is often what comedians say dyslexia is because that is funny (but incorrect). This is how I feel about OCD, that there is real and terrible OCD and the more everyday "OCD" desire for things to be neat and orderly often mined for comedy effect.

Anyway, as I was going through my DVDs I was hit by a number of categorising problems and my OCD tendencies kicked in, If I categorise them in the wrong place then my whole collection is wrong. Before we even get to specific problems there is the basic idea of how they should be categorised. In High Fidelity the main character tried to organise his records autobiographically, meaning that he had to remember how he got the record to know where it should go. I have never tried that but I did used to organise my CDs by how much I liked the artist and so any reorganisation became a heartbreaking set of decisions - did I really like The Smiths more than David Bowie? The next step would have to abandon even the idea of grouping the artist's various CDs together and treating each album individually. Thankfully I abandoned that system and adopted one based on the alphabet.

But to specifics, first, I have three James Bond films, should they be sorted alphabetically and independent of each other by title - Casino Royale, Goldeneye and Skyfall, or should they be put together and put under B for Bond. If the answer is together in this little block of Bond films how are they organised? Alphabetically, so Casino Royale, Goldeneye, Skyfall? Or chronologically from the year they were made - Goldeneye, Casino Royale, Skyfall. Or should they be put in the order of the Bond story which could be argued would have Casino Royale first as this was Bond's origins story but I have no idea which would come next. Some filmmakers seem to have been out to intentionally cause problems for example I own X-Men, X-Men 2, X-Men: First Class, X:Men Origins - Wolverine and The Wolvervine. Should The Wolverine which is part of this story be put under X for X-Men, or W for Wolverine?

And what about box sets of stuff? Against my advice my partner of twelve years, Spooky Reading Girl (SRG for short), bought a boxset of Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, the last one of these is considered by many to be the worst film ever made. Spooky Reading Girl is a term the comedian Jackie Keshian came up with to describe her own book-reading obsessed childhood and so is very apt for my partner. SRG and I have a shared DVD collection although interestingly we each insisted on maintaining separate book and CD collections. You may want to guess when I mention the DVDs in this collection which are hers and which are mine. SRG had not seen the last two films in the Batman box set and I had. SRG's position was perfectly sensible that it was cheaper to buy this boxset than it was to buy the two good films - Batman and Batman Returns. I felt this is an example when less is more and would have paid more money to just have the two good films.

I also own Christopher Nolan's trilogy of Batman films as well as the animated films Batman: The Dark Knight Return Parts 1 & 2 (based on the graphic novel which I would highly recommend as The Dark Knight Rises and the upcoming Superman Vs Batman film were hugely influenced by  it). So I have three sets of Batman films, do they all go under B? I settled on the Batman quadrilogy is under B, as is Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Parts 1 & 2 but the Nolan trilogy is under D for Dark Knight as I, and indeed others, call it the Dark Knight trilogy.

I also started imagining my own peculiar film seasons based on the idiosyncrasies of our DVD collection. There is the decidedly uneven "Three Americans Trilogy" - American Beauty, American Dreamz and American Hustle. There is the Numbered Collection that started with Nigel Winterbottom's superb 24 Hour Party People followed by romantic comedy 27 Dresses and to end a double bill of not quite zombie horror 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later.  There is the spectacular Man & Men Season - A Serious Man, A Single Man, The Man Who Would Be King, The Man With Two Brains, The Third Man, The Men Who Stare At Goats and No Country For Old Men. And there is no surer sign of the inherent sexism of Hollywood (or perhaps mine and SRG's sexism) that in Woman & Women series there is just The Women.

Having completed the reorganisation I was hit by the final obstacle of friends returning DVDs they had borrowed that have lost their place in the collection and until I come to do it again will remain frustratingly out of place; showing up whole thing as the doomed to fail enterprise that it is and that I shouldn't let it bother me.

Don't Cross the Online Streaming Services - Netflix vs Amazon

The Man In The High Castle is a novel by sci-fi legend Philip K Dick and I daresay that even if you haven't read his books you are at least familiar with some of the adaptations of his work; the most famous being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adapted into Blade Runner. The Man In The High Castle imagined a world in which the Allies lost World War II and America was invaded and occupied by the Nazis and the Japanese. The Japanese took the western half of the country and the Nazis the East. The book dealt with the "Americans" living under the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes. Amazon Prime have recently adapted this book into a television show with the same name and I recently watched the first episode. I should say that while I am a fan of Philip K Dick I have not read the book.

The first episode was very good and did a great job of setting up this new world, with references to the Nazis dropping an atom bomb on Washington DC and clearly that was one of the reasons the Allies lost the war. I remember reading the comments of a Japanese general saying an invasion of America would never work as while you could perhaps defeat their armies it had a huge population that was heavily armed and any occupation would fail. In the show, especially in the Eastern Nazi half of America, they have done a lot of work imagining how the Nazis have kept the country under their control, for example, the Hitler Youth has been established in America suggesting that children are being brought up under the belief that being a Nazi is a good thing. There is a resistance to both the Nazis and the Japanese but increasingly this seems to be from the older generations, people who lived in the old, free America.

The story in the first episode involved a film that showed the Allies winning World War II, films that are supposedly made by "The Man In The High Castle". Possession of such a film would be considered treasonous. Whether it is a propaganda film made by the resistance or that it is meant that the timeline had been altered so the Nazis won and this film is rare evidence of that change, has not yet been made clear. A thoroughly chilling scene is when a truck driver is pulled over by a police officer and while they are talking ash fell to the ground from the sky, the police officer explained that since it was Tuesday the hospital would have just euthanised anyone considered a burden to the state - the crippled, the old, etc. What is most chilling is that this officer is an American, someone who fought in World War II against the Nazis and Japanese, who doesn't seem appalled at the awful murder of these people, to him it is just a simple fact of life.

This show has been made by Amazon and is available to Amazon Prime subscribers. A few years ago the idea of Amazon making actual shows would have been laughable, they sold stuff, they didn't make it. Certainly no one would have thought that it would be well-made quality drama. Amazon's stable of shows it's made include Hand of God, crime drama Bosch and probably most famously Transparent. Transparent is a sitcom about an elderly man who came out to his family as transgender and would henceforth be living as a woman. The main character is played by the brilliant Jeffrey Tambor who has been in many things but I knew him most from the imprisoned housing developer George Bluth in Arrested Development. Transparent has been a big success for Amazon and they have been lauded for the sensitive handling of this issue and, importantly, being very funny (I have not actually gotten round to watching it but I've heard good things).

Amazon is essentially in a two-horse race with the other online streaming service Netflix and they too have made a host of original shows. I originally subscribed to Netflix as it was the only place to legally watch Breaking Bad, then they were making a new season of Arrested Development and so on and so on. Personally I think Netflix has made much better programmes with House of Cards featuring Kevin Spacey as probably their biggest success. Other great programmes are:

• Bojack Horseman - animated show about an actor who was on a hugely popular sitcom in the 90s but hasn't done much since. And he's a horse, but he's like a person, he talks, he wears clothes etc. It is hysterically funny but also at times very tragic.
• Orange is the New Black - a drama in a women's prison based on the real life story of a middle-class woman arrested for a drug related crime she committed ten years ago, this is someone who would never have expected to be sent to prison. The show is very good at looking at the reasons why these people are in prison and how bizarre the prison system in Amercia is, for example America has the highest percentage of people in prison in the world, around 700 people per 100,000 is in prison, in comparison in England and Wales it is 145 people per 100,000. 
• The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Kimmy has been trapped in an underground bunker for years by an insane cult leader and the show started with their rescue. Kimmy goes out into the world trying to make a life after missing out on so much. This is a very dark premise for a sitcom but it is very funny and the cameo role of the cult leader is one of the best examples of casting ever.
• Daredevil - television series based on the Marvel comic books, very dark and brooding. One of the best decisions of the show is that he doesn't wear the Daredevil costume at first but fights crime dressed in black and a mask pulled over the top half of his face. The fight scenes have a brutal sense of realism to them, Daredevil hits someone and they get back up, that doesn't happen with most superheroes. Also just released is Jessica Jones, another Marvel comic adaptation that exists in the same world as Daredevil.

• They have brought back at least two great shows - the first being Arrested Development but also essentially making new episodes of Mr. Show with Bob and David, the HBO sketch show starring David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, under the new name of With Bob and David. I loved Mr. Show and never thought the show would be brought back, Bob Odenkirk has had recent success playing Saul Goodman/James McGill in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul and David Cross has subsequently played Tobias Funke in Arrested Development.

So far Netflix have made far more shows that Amazon and, in my opinion, better shows. But it is certainly true that both have made programmes that would have perhaps struggled to get aired on normal television channels.

In terms of which is the better service to subscribe to if you can only have one (in our household we subscribe to both) again I prefer Netflix. There is something odd but interesting about Netflix and the way they do business. Until very recently Netflix didn't organise it's programmes and films in the simple categories of Film - Horror or Television - Comedy, no instead they would have categories like Dark Films, Gritty Dramas, Classic Sci-Fi and often these labels seemed to have very little to do with the selection of films and programmes. While they have introdcued a more traditional system they have kept their peculiar categories as well.

Netflix also seemed to have more unusual one-off programmes and documentaries. It has the outstanding Ragnarok, the bizarre stand up from John Hodgman about the end of the world (who is my own personal hero and fake internet judge), old documentaries about the American Civil War, a lot of stand up comedy from American comedians not known well in the UK such as Mike Birbiglia, Nick Offerman and more.

If we must have a VHS-Betamax style showdown between these two online services I would definitely support Netflix - the weirder, more original one of the two and as inaccurate as this may be Netflix does feel more like the underdog against the giant corporation that is Amazon.