Dickens & Dawkins
I've been watching more Little Dorrit.
It's a queer beast; parts of it are excellent, other parts less so. Andy Serkis's performance as the villainous Frenchman Rigaud is very good but... but, well, he's playing "the villainous Frenchman Rigaud", a character who appears to have wandered in from an 'Allo 'Allo end-of-season special. The scenes in the Circumlocution Office (a department of government which exists solely to prevent anything getting done) are very funny in the book but, in the TV series, come across as rather overstaged, all arched eyebrows and cut-glass vowels.
On the upside, Mr Pancks is as enjoyable to watch as he should be, though I feel Mr Casby should come across as rather more of a blundering oaf (the point, for those of you who are not familiar with the story, is that Casby is a landlord who is loved by his tenants as a kind and jolly man, and Pancks is the tenacious rent-collector, whom the tenants believe to be a cruel and hard-hearted man; actually, Pancks is a pleasant man who's just doing his job and Casby is a money-obsessed booby who is fortunate enough to look like a benevolent Old Testament Patriarch). Mr Dorrit (in fact the entire Dorrit family) are great, and Ron Cook and Russell Tovey excel as the jailer and his son*.
I have a feeling that the main missing ingredient is the narrative voice. Dickens, it occurs to me, spends a lot of Little Dorrit telling the reader whether characters are goodies or baddies. Shorn of that, the characters either seem a bit forgettable (like Mr Casby) or one-dimensional (like Rigaud). Oh well. I shall still watch and, I have no doubt, thoroughly enjoy, the whole thing.
Also, Richard Dawkins may well have gone mad. He plans to write a children's book in his retirement, and was quoted by the Telegraph (hardly a reliable source, I realise) as saying
"I would like to know whether there is any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards has a pernicious effect.
"So many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes and I'm not sure whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality. Perhaps it's something for research."
When I first read that, I thought it may well have been the Telegraph selectively plucking quotes from an interview and stripping away the context to fabricate a story where no story existed. However, a video of the interview (originally shown on Channel 4 news) is available on Dawkins's own website, and he really does appear to be talking bollocks.
It's possible to defend this by saying that Dawkins was only speculating about something that would be interesting to research. However, someone as media-savvy as Dawkins really, really ought to know that if you say something like that in your valedictory interview (he's retiring as Professor of Public Understanding of Science), people are going to pick up on it. People don't tend to speculatively muse in interviews. It seems very, very odd though- in The God Delusion, he throws in a shout-out (for no particular reason, but that book has a lot of name-dropping in it) to Philip Pullman, and devotes a largish amount of space to discuss why religion and other myths (seen as myths, of course) are an important part of our culture. How does this mesh with these anti-fantasy statements.
Odd. Very odd.
Errrrmm... what else? Haven't been watching Heroes, but I probably mean to at some point. Nor have I been reading any interesting fiction, which I blame on the looming exams. Going to Nottingham for the weekend, which should be excellent. That's about all!
*Ron Cook being otherwise known as D'Oyly Carte from the G&S biopic Topsy-Turvy and as Mr Magpie from the Doctor Who episode The Idiot's Lantern; Russel Tovey also known as Midshipman Alonso Frame from Voyage of the Damned. Freema Agyeman and Eve Myles round out the Doctor Who contingent, without which no period drama would be complete.
It's a queer beast; parts of it are excellent, other parts less so. Andy Serkis's performance as the villainous Frenchman Rigaud is very good but... but, well, he's playing "the villainous Frenchman Rigaud", a character who appears to have wandered in from an 'Allo 'Allo end-of-season special. The scenes in the Circumlocution Office (a department of government which exists solely to prevent anything getting done) are very funny in the book but, in the TV series, come across as rather overstaged, all arched eyebrows and cut-glass vowels.
On the upside, Mr Pancks is as enjoyable to watch as he should be, though I feel Mr Casby should come across as rather more of a blundering oaf (the point, for those of you who are not familiar with the story, is that Casby is a landlord who is loved by his tenants as a kind and jolly man, and Pancks is the tenacious rent-collector, whom the tenants believe to be a cruel and hard-hearted man; actually, Pancks is a pleasant man who's just doing his job and Casby is a money-obsessed booby who is fortunate enough to look like a benevolent Old Testament Patriarch). Mr Dorrit (in fact the entire Dorrit family) are great, and Ron Cook and Russell Tovey excel as the jailer and his son*.
I have a feeling that the main missing ingredient is the narrative voice. Dickens, it occurs to me, spends a lot of Little Dorrit telling the reader whether characters are goodies or baddies. Shorn of that, the characters either seem a bit forgettable (like Mr Casby) or one-dimensional (like Rigaud). Oh well. I shall still watch and, I have no doubt, thoroughly enjoy, the whole thing.
Also, Richard Dawkins may well have gone mad. He plans to write a children's book in his retirement, and was quoted by the Telegraph (hardly a reliable source, I realise) as saying
"I would like to know whether there is any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards has a pernicious effect.
"So many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes and I'm not sure whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality. Perhaps it's something for research."
When I first read that, I thought it may well have been the Telegraph selectively plucking quotes from an interview and stripping away the context to fabricate a story where no story existed. However, a video of the interview (originally shown on Channel 4 news) is available on Dawkins's own website, and he really does appear to be talking bollocks.
It's possible to defend this by saying that Dawkins was only speculating about something that would be interesting to research. However, someone as media-savvy as Dawkins really, really ought to know that if you say something like that in your valedictory interview (he's retiring as Professor of Public Understanding of Science), people are going to pick up on it. People don't tend to speculatively muse in interviews. It seems very, very odd though- in The God Delusion, he throws in a shout-out (for no particular reason, but that book has a lot of name-dropping in it) to Philip Pullman, and devotes a largish amount of space to discuss why religion and other myths (seen as myths, of course) are an important part of our culture. How does this mesh with these anti-fantasy statements.
Odd. Very odd.
Errrrmm... what else? Haven't been watching Heroes, but I probably mean to at some point. Nor have I been reading any interesting fiction, which I blame on the looming exams. Going to Nottingham for the weekend, which should be excellent. That's about all!
*Ron Cook being otherwise known as D'Oyly Carte from the G&S biopic Topsy-Turvy and as Mr Magpie from the Doctor Who episode The Idiot's Lantern; Russel Tovey also known as Midshipman Alonso Frame from Voyage of the Damned. Freema Agyeman and Eve Myles round out the Doctor Who contingent, without which no period drama would be complete.