There's a room where the light won't find you

[sovay]

It is the night before Readercon and I am running a fever. I had a nausea-making headache all day, but I thought it would break when we got the torrential rain that briefly turned our street into a water park and caused the women's toilets at spatch's rehearsal space to overflow. It ebbed a little and I finished my work and then I had to stop looking at my computer and lie down for several hours in a darkened room. I get that on some level my body just wants to exist in a state of perpetual Victorian ill health, but the second floor does not a garret make—especially when we have upstairs neighbors—and I am unconvinced that laudanum would work any better on me than most opiates. Also, I'd really just rather not.

1. I don't know whether to describe this essay on Brian Clemens' The Professionals (1978–83) as a celebration, a critique, or stomp-on-the-brakes rubbernecking, but it's wonderfully written and has convinced me that the show was definitely something, even if not necessarily something I want to see. Okay, maybe a couple of episodes. "Having watched the whole of Sapphire & Steel, every surviving episode of Ace Of Wands and his contribution to the children's supernatural series Shadows, I can say without hesitation that 'Heroes' is by far the least realistic thing that PJ Hammond has ever written."

2. Speaking of sympathy for the fascists: vidding Star Wars' Imperials to "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" might sound like low-hanging fruit, but it's Lorde's cover and the vid is both darkly funny and creepingly immersive. handful_ofdust calls it "a Mirror Universe existence" and I had somehow not quite noticed before that unless the vidder futzed with the light levels, Imperial interiors in the original films all look like something out of a horror movie, Kubrick-sterile and glowing dark as space. The music sometimes follows and sometimes illuminates the images and the whole project basically delights me in the same way as realizing a few years ago that Piett fandom had gone mainstream. (kore, are you the person who directed me to Michael Pennington's deleted scenes?) Rob observes that the line about Mother Nature is especially trenchant in context of the Battle of Endor "when they're fucking defeated by Ewoks and trees."

3. Speaking of getting fucking defeated by nature, Rob has chronicled on Twitter the night the baby spiders decided to join us in the shower.

4. Speaking of things I wish hadn't happened, this article courtesy of rushthatspeaks is an interesting and valuable look at the filming of rape scenes and it is not that I feel bad now for having loved Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970) when I saw it, but I feel a lot stranger about future Jodorowsky and that really angers me.

5. I don't have a good segue here. They Can Talk reminds me a lot of The Far Side. I am especially fond of "Shark Rescue" and "forbidden."

At least I have no programming of my own tomorrow.

Comments

[sovay]

The credits on David Collings's episode are really quite something (the article quotes them too, I see).

Okay, so do you have any idea why he's randomly dubbed for five seconds on his way out of the bowling alley? There's another character in the same episode who I think may be dubbed all the way through (and if she wasn't, their sound engineering was terrible), but Collings has a very distinctive voice; it's not like people won't notice when it changes!

(I watched the episode; it was free online. It was a fascinating experience because everything up until the last six minutes was frequently disjointed and completely disposable beyond the fun of recognizing actors—Gerald James! I last saw you being bargained in a railway station to a darkness from outside Time!—and then the actual defusing of the bomb was just as compelling as that kind of finale is supposed to be. I credit it almost entirely to Collings' ability to look like he really believes they'll all go up in a cloud of plutonium if he puts a screwdriver wrong. With his hair dripping into his work because one of the heroes threw a bucket of water in his face to bring him around after he was cold-cocked by his former fellow terrorist. And then it goes back to being disposable for the last thirty seconds. That is sadly not the ratio of "entertaining" to "is this plot with one of the heroes chatting up a girl going anywhere? kind of? not really?" that I really look for in my media.)

THat description of PJ Hammond's ep is quite something though, although I don't remember it at all if it was S1! Presumably it wasn't?

It's listed in the first season. I am almost certainly going to watch it, just because "blowing two of the baddies out of a dinghy with a grenade launcher, while Bodie shoots the other two from behind a motorised lawnmower" made me crack up. Then I think I will probably be all right not watching any more of The Professionals.

and, lol, so many British TV actors are working for the Empire.

As a primer on character actors, those movies have served me well.

[thisbluespirit]

Okay, so do you have any idea why he's randomly dubbed for five seconds on his way out of the bowling alley?

LOL, that was one of the first things I said when I watched it! "That's not David Collings!!" Nobody else I know who's also watched it noticed or cared, because I suppose they were too busy admiring either Bodie or Doyle, or both. (How can they not? He really does have such a distinctive voice, yes! But there, I don't get excited by Martin Shaw in tight jeans, which is equally incomprehensible to them, I suppose. ;-D)

I assume something went wrong with the sound on location - maybe there was some noise or problems spotted afterwards or something - and David Collings wasn't available during the post-production period. (I wondered if it was Martin Shaw, as it sounded a little like him to me. Pros fandom is in depth enough that somebody might know if you can find some online episode guides of the sort that have trivia, but I should imagine it would be something like that.)

Oh, well, if it was in the first season, I certainly don't remember anything being even a fraction as weird as S&S so that article is thoroughly unreliable. I watched the entire first series and all I can say is that some episodes were certainly better than the David Collings one, aside from not having Mr Collings, and I came away liking Gordon Jackson, but it was Not For Me. Too much overt 70s sexism and all the women getting rapidly murdered.

(You asked about Professionals fandom: it seems to be a very likeable one with lots of good people in it, as far as I can tell. Lots of slash but also lots of long, plotty case fic. Or at least, going by the Pros fans on my flist.)

[sovay]

But there, I don't get excited by Martin Shaw in tight jeans, which is equally incomprehensible to them, I suppose.

I'm still having trouble remembering which one was Martin Shaw. David Collings in jeans at all (and a T-shirt!) was a novelty.

I assume something went wrong with the sound on location - maybe there was some noise or problems spotted afterwards or something - and David Collings wasn't available during the post-production period.

That makes sense and is a completely reasonable thing to have go wrong during production. It was just very jarring.

I watched the entire first series and all I can say is that some episodes were certainly better than the David Collings one, aside from not having Mr Collings, and I came away liking Gordon Jackson, but it was Not For Me. Too much overt 70s sexism and all the women getting rapidly murdered.

I can see that starting to pall. At least in "Stake Out" the one significant woman just turns out to be a junkie because they had to tie up the drug ring subplot somehow in and among all the badly organized white supremacy.

(And yet, this episode did have the quality identifed by the Quietus review where I don't actually want those fifty minutes of my life back, I just mostly wasn't watching anything good.)

(You asked about Professionals fandom: it seems to be a very likeable one with lots of good people in it, as far as I can tell. Lots of slash but also lots of long, plotty case fic. Or at least, going by the Pros fans on my flist.)

Okay, cool. Based on this one episode, I couldn't figure out what direction the fic was likely to go in, although banter seemed likely.

[thisbluespirit]

Okay, cool. Based on this one episode, I couldn't figure out what direction the fic was likely to go in, although banter seemed likely.

I don't think it was a particularly typical episode, to be fair to the Pros. But I was also, as you were, much amused and entertained by David Collings's drenched bomb defusing, and I have not seen him in casual wear in just about anything else. (Hmm, except maybe his Holy City appearance last year, actually, but that was all modern.)

I noped out on the murdering of females when they murdered Pamela Salem. There are limits.

[sovay]

But I was also, as you were, much amused and entertained by David Collings's drenched bomb defusing, and I have not seen him in casual wear in just about anything else.

I haven't even seen the fabled Victorian hyenas and it already feels weirdly apropos for David Collings to show up as a guest star—playing a South African terrorist? I couldn't tell if he was just a local bomb-maker they'd picked up for the occasion, although we're obviously not supposed to rate him as too sympathetic if he was willing to nuke London for the sake of white nationalism or at least a paycheck—and get punched out and a bucket of water thrown on him.

I noped out on the murdering of females when they murdered Pamela Salem. There are limits.

Well, feh.

[thisbluespirit]

I haven't even seen the fabled Victorian hyenas and it already feels weirdly apropos for David Collings to show up as a guest star

Nobody's seen the fabled hyenas; the budget didn't run to that.