Et In Arcadia Ego

What on Earth?! They don't have the right to make a decision like that on the basis of what "might" be the case! Yeh, I know: I use their service, I live by their rules. But I don't know why they would effectively cripple their own service by making it inflexible for people who (inexplicably) object to any of that.

The assumption is that everyone wants everything linked, public, available, visible - maybe that's the case. But that's a horrible assumption to make. Facebook does the same - last month it made everything public by default, and you have to reprivate things.

Whitehall is still a crazy mess, so Spirita and I will tomorrow be making our own bid for power. No one voted us into power, but it's OK: no one voted them in either. News, as it happens:

• 11.15 - Spirita and Unmutual decide to form a coalition over baked beans and mash.
  

• 11.58- the new Coalition Government of Horn Lane declare the first aspects of their manifesto: they are "definitely pro-Susie", but are anti "sugar-free peanut butter". Where they will stand on the bus is yet to be revealed.
  

• 0.08 - Calypso, the official opposition, has just threatened military junta.

• 00:10 - Talks begin with "The Lauren Party", a splinter group for "judgemental people who like pirates"

• 00:12 - First look at the headlines "No, We Still Don't Know Anything" says the Times; "Top Political Journalists Are Now Two Days Past Their Bedtime" says the Guardian; "Britain's Got Talent Horror" says Sun.
  

• 00.15 - the Lauren Party refuses to join the coalition. Plans are made to nuke her. We would also nuke the opposition, but unfortunately she lives with us and that's not how nuclear fallout works.

• 00.30 - maybe real politics would be better if the leaders all had to share a house? Or does that way bad fanfic lie?
  

In Today's Issue: Absolutely No Politics Because Nobody Continues to Know Anything.

Instead, my heart was a little captured by the new Prisoner, and I feel the need to talk about it. For the sake of tidiness, the new series will be referred to in capital letters. So Number Six and SIX, Two and TWO, Village and VILLAGE.


No era does not need The Prisoner. That's the thought that swung me from righteous-fan-anger to theoretical support of this year's reboot of a TV classic. The questions it asks - as far as we can tell - have never gone away: surveillance, control, society, worrying global conflicts. Here's Patrick McGoohan in 1977, a proto-Tyler Durden:

We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television,
and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche. Buying the product, to excess. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed. We all live in a little Village. Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners.

The need for intelligent shows which scream never goes away. Of course, you also want good art. I'm surprised, but pleased, to see my faith in the new series has not been misplaced.

For one thing, it is very close textually to the original. Each episode is semi-named after an original episode; the title sequence is an exciting shot-for-shot update. SIX's entry to the VILLAGE is the product of close viewings of the original, complete with a futile attempt to buy a map and chumming up with a taxi driver. From little touches, like a cup of tea trembling as its table is bashed, to huge ones like Rover. Rover, the inexplicable white balloon guarddog, might even have been on my "to-cut" list!

But of course, faithfulness is not a necessarily good quality. Yet it's not just a visual synchronicity; they seem to have their ideas in the right place, hitting the right points. In short, I feel it has been written by someone who loved the original. The new ideas, such as VILLAGER'S total denial of the outside world, or SIX'S amnesia, slip right beside. With such high level of respect, I've even dignified it as semi-canon: it confirms many theories of mine left over from the original.

There are criticisms to be made: the script is notably dull. And where McGoohan was endlessly watcheable, Cazviel has a fatal lack of charisma. He speaks in a monotone, and he is hard to like except through sheer "Monte Cristo" factor: What Is Happening To You Is So Horrible I Can't Help But Pity You. One wonders how he would fare if, as in the original, SIX was the only recurring character with dialogue.

In a broader sense, McGoohan's Prisoner had this steely inner strength to him which Cazviel almost inevitably lacks. My dad complains a lot about feminised men on the telly, and I agree to an extent. The problem is, good drama requires characters to be exaggerated in their emotional vulnerability. They don't have to be wimps, but we as an audience need to recognise what they are feeling. And the more transparently wrecked they are, the better the show. You can find evidence in any cop show whose hero has marriage problems and a drug habit. Most writers and showrunners are still male, so unlike (say) slashfic, it's not a case of women authors/viewers emasculating them - it just makes for better television. Satyajit Ray noted:

"the camera forces one to face facts, to probe, to reveal, to get close to people and things; while the British nature inclines to the opposite; to stay aloof, to cloak harsh truths with innuendoes. You cannot make great films if you suffer from constricting inhibitions of this sort."

I obviously disagree; repressed British cinema is more powerful for what it's not saying. But of course, Patrick McGoohan was thoroughly of this British school and way before heroes who cry on television. Whereas Cazaviel is all method, and SIX already seems creakier if only because the shows are made in very different. One is not necessarily more valid than the other, but it changes the atmosphere. The Prisoner was a series about rebellion, and McGoohan was the man who could not be broken: the more the Village slammed him down, the angrier he got and harder he fought back. THE PRISONER already seems more hopeless, because SIX was broken to begin with.

Unlike his plywood performance, this is not such a problem. It merely reflects modern concerns, and modern production strategies. So far what it loses as an intellectual workout, it gains in emotion. It is less surreal, less stylised. The VILLAGE has a group of regular characters, which makes it seem more of a real place and less of a dreamscape. So far, we have seen them decieved, drugged and scared, and TWO is fallible and seemingly on the point of losing control. The Village, on the other hand, was "proved" to be in three seperate locations, people would appear and disappear out of nowhere and they were controlled like Sims - with Number Six totally isolated from anyone.

Blame time: a similar comment can be made about Doctor Who. It's no exaggeration to say that the first 30 years of the show did plot and not character, whereas nowadays it does character and not plot. Of course there was emotion in the Classic series, just as there was in The Prisoner,
but it was created by the actors and plumbing their tortured souls was a byproduct of delivering three act structures. And nowadays, a Doctor Who finale is expected to prioritise a strong emotional beat over a narrative one:

One is not intrinsically better than the other, it's merely a matter of changing decades. Although I think the classic model is better. Sometimes, emotional scenes are so strong that you can suspend your logic - personally, I'd include them talking Bracewell out of exploding, and Last of the Timelords in this category. But actors can't make sense of basically nonsensical material, in the same way they can make the thinnest script powerful. I'd definitely include Turlough in the latter class, who steals scenes on the basis the writers didn't give him any.

Of course, the perfect show model is Blake's 7, who had master-plotter Terry Nation doing thorough, exciting outlines, which were then polished by Chris Boucher's gift for character: a bit of both. But that's another tangent altogether:

So far, PRISONER is hitting emotional beats like crazy, although arguably it cares as damn-all for making sense as the original.

Nothing is going to replace my love of the original, but in a sense it doesn't need to. It is a show designed for it's era, flashbacking on the back of Lost, with a hero cast in the mould of Fight Club man*. It is, in it's purest sense, a modern version - sprung from the same source but flavoured for a new audience. I wonder whether the "towers" that represent escape are meant to resemble the Twin Towers? It wouldn't surprise me if that was significant if only visually.

I particularly enjoyed the creepy twin shrinks, and the Village TV show (rather like Twin Peaks "Invitation to Love") - which I am sure is the basis for some form of hypnosis. I am enjoying it immensely, and am particularly psyched for the ending. It can't be anything but downbeat (or can it, in a world where studio after studio would only support Watchmen if that chapter was removed?), and could yet be too keen to explain away its mysteries. In particular, the possibility that the Village was an imagined construct excused any lunacy the original had to offer: THE PRISONER is going to provide a compelling reason why THE VILLAGE exists, and why everyone is there, in keeping with it's more realistic tone. But for now, I'm having as close as I can to the experience of watching the original for the first time.

Which was a crazy few months. After the exhausting penultimate episode, which was so intense to film one of the actors had a breakdown, I had a vivid dream of "the final episode" in which Number 6 finally escaped. The dream, that is, not the episode; that's still a moot point. And one of the first things that happened when he did escape was - as my mind-camera panned on his ear - he heard the chimes of Big Ben. When I did see Fall Out, I was unnerved to note that was exactly what did happen. It was a strange occurence, for a show which always plumbed close to dreams. It remains to be seen whether I'll be that nightmarishly involved in four episodes time.

What would McGoohan made of it all? You can see the hole where he was supposed to cameo, heartbreakingly filled by somebody else. When the production team asked for his involvement, his response was perfect: "I want to play Number 2".

*Homo Decuriae Pugantae?


P.S. I remain critical of the new Doctor Who series. I hate it. Being critical, that is. I still have hopes - but we are suprisingly far through, and I'm yet to be wholly sold on the New Administration. Smith'n'Gillen are beyond reproach. Eleven can confidently take his place in my top ten favourite Doctors (curses - I can't make that joke any more...), the dialogue has been consistantly fab, and I like what it's doing with the mythology. But there has been something very mechanical about the series so far, a collection of ideas not a coherent narrative. Behind the Sofa put its finger on my disquiet:

Throughout, it’s hard to escape the impression of Moffat coming up with the scares first and then working backwards to see how he can fit them into the story (“Why would the Doctor suddenly plunge an entire corridor full of advancing Angels into pitch blackness? Oh, I know! He needs to divert the power to the door!”). Poor old Amy suffers particularly badly from this tickbox terror approach: watching her subjected to various forms of torture across these 90 minutes feels a bit like watching a pre-watershed version of Saw. (“Let’s see, we’ll have her all alone in the middle of a forest full of Angels where the one thing you can’t do is blink… Nah, too easy, let’s also say she can’t open her eyes…” I’m surprised he didn’t tie her shoelaces together while he was at it.)

Tickbox terror: wonderful phrase. I'd extend the same criticism to the-Starwhale-one, which felt like the rat end of five good episodes smushed together - it seemed to run out of ideas, yet also have no time to breathe at the same time.

My customary optimism is flagging every single week, and it's very disappointing. Having said that, the boys on the internet think they have spotted a very, very, very exciting thing from the future. I'd noticed the odd oddity, but they've confirmed my hunch by connecting it to something brilliant, so my eyes will be peeled from now on. Geeks are good at overanalysis.

It's so likely to be true, that I class it as a spoiler and can't wait to see you all watching with open, awe-struck mouths. Something very clever is going on. And it's gonna be fantastic!

When we say "blue", do we mean exactly the same thing? It's a matter of philosophical debate going to the root of human experience.

I just realised I'm the man who sees lime where others see aqua. I reallyo, trulyo cannot smell. I've known this for ages, but only just realised what a huge and weird thing it is, and how difference a life experience I'm going through as a result.

I cannot be relied upon to smell anything. I assumed it was a sort of laziness, as if I wasn't putting in enough effort - but you don't put in effort with senses. They're just there, and you don't need effort to touch or hear.

It has only recently occured to me that this is very different to the way others do it.

Some things, I can smell, but often, only when something is pointed out to me - which makes me wonder if I am creating the experience because I know I ought to smell something. I remember:

• banana; smells rather like dried banana tastes, a clammy sweetness. I should add that in general, I can't catch the scent of banana - this was a onetime occasion, and I basically pushed it up my nostrils for five minutes before I got anything. And when I succeeded, I found it totally revolting.
  
• vomit, sometimes, a similarly sweet sensation
  
• rotting celery - but everyone else there insisted it didn't smell of anything
• the sea, and sort-of fish
  
• perfume; but it never smells pleasant or even different. It's like a constant, metallic chemical tang. Friend 4 and Calypso both insist that's all it ever smells like.
• Actually, I'm quite good with chemical: deodourant
• I think I have smelt smoke, although this could be wishful thinking.
  
• In addition, I experience very vivid phantom smells when reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. I do not know what this means, if anything.
  

Are these all a certain type of smell? But crucially, I only ever get them when paying serious attention. What can't I smell? Everything else. There are probably smells I don't even know I'm missing! Does milk smell? What about biscuits? I know rocks don't smell, because the movie Perfume says so, but what about wood? I suppose the biggest and most obvious casualty is nature. A list of things I have definitely never smelt:

• flowers (and flower-scented things). Do sunflowers smell?
• grass
• trees
• Dinner cooking in the distance
• people - now is your cue to say "well, that explains a lot..."
  
• exhaust fumes
• pets (apparently the rats smell...?)
  
• crap (does crap smell? It seems like it ought, being generally disgusting and objectionable, but I've never got that impression)
  

As an aesthete, I am depressed that I miss part of the sensory experience of the world. But only in the way I abstractly "miss" the fact I'm not telepathic: it's not like I've lost something I had. Which does happen to some, and that must really suck. Friend 5 has the most incredible olifactory memory. Often she'll catch whiff of something, and link it to a very specific memory: "ooooh, it smells just like that book I was reading two years ago"; or "that smells of my fire at Christmas".

It often seems to me like a bloody superpower. I'm always impressed when someone can tell a smoker is around, even before seeing them - Calypso does this all the time. Smoke irritates my nostrils, but doesn't really smell of anything but heavy. I certainly only "smell" it when I know someone is smoking nearby. Mind you, Calypso often regards my state as similarly marvellous - especially when someone has to volunteer for a really reeky job!

I do feel a revulsed sensation when handling rotting food, but I'm increasingly sure this is just imitation of what I should have; and if I don't think about it, I do not notice. A sense is instinctive. I suppose the nearest analogy would be tuning out loud music.

Wikipedia calls the condition "anosmia", but also mentions "hyposmia" which is a partial loss of smell. I'm not sure which I have, and I don't think there's an easy way to work it out because from evidence, I know you can (or at least, I can) create phantom pain in a limb merely by imagining it diseased. So how would I ever "know" I smelt, not just imagining I smelt? And how could I tell whether my experience of what I call "smell" is the same as most people's? It certainly makes sense that variable smell perceptions governs what regular folk like or dislike.

Friend 4 has suggested that maybe the impulses are being redirected to the wrong bit of my brain, mentioning that I am rather on the synesthetic side. Synesthesia is interpreting one sense as another, most famously seeing letters/numbers as linked to colours. I do this a bit, but in particular, I have a very strong visual map of how time works, in blocks and boxes; even with which way I'm "facing" at any one time. You think this'd help my disorganisation...but it's not conscious.

So maybe if my mental circitry is already miswired, that explains where the smells are going. Charming: my brain resembles my bedroom. Wikipedia suggests the death of receptor neurons, brain injury, and an early onset of Parkinson's or Alzheimers. Woo!

Clash (among others) has pointed out that if I can't smell, surely I can't taste? I evidently am able to taste, but I now wonder if my experience of food is different. It's been observed that I have very plain tastes, and am happy to eat the same meal ad nauseam. And now I wonder: does this explain why I've always preferred demolishing plates by food "type", because I wouldn't get a taste experience at all if I took carbs and veg it in turns? Why I've never found food all that interesting? Is this why I don't do spices? Is the taste of regular food as vivid to you lot as spice is to me? Or why I love the intense hit of sherbert, or hyper-masochistically-dark dark chocolate? And now I wonder: Would caviar taste of anything to me? Are my favourite foods determined chiefly by what I can smell? If I did crack, would it have any effect?

A very interesting article on the Guardian confirms my theory about spice, and reminded me that I've never really distinguished between different types of tea. It really just tastes like nice hot water to me - I definitely can't smell it. Nor coffee. Another article by a hyposmic claims it made his vegitarianism easier, althought I would disagree with this on a personal level. One of the most sure-fire indicators that I am really, really hungry is that I start craving meat like mad, normally those cheap hotdog sausages. Mind you, I now doubt that I could ever tell the taste difference between beef, chicken, and the rest. The fact I have to presume there's a difference seems like confirmation...and a third article, most interesting of all, written by a normal bod whose smell has gone due to a cold. It displays correlations with what I regularly experience - especially red wine, water (dude, does water smell/taste of anything?) and onion. The article I mentioned above, by someone who lost smell late in life, confirms my theory about unsubtle lemon and sherbert, while suggesting my dislike of mashed potato and peas could also be related. 50% of the Ben and Jerry's creative team is ansomnic, which is why their ice cream is so darn good: it heavily relies on image and texture.

I've also found a blogger who, perhaps obsessively, discusses his condition. Although it came to him later in life, so I can see why it would make such an impression. If given the chance - and there are Places That Can Do Stuff About Stuff Like This - would I take it? Resounding no. I can't imagine it would be anything but agony, irritating, interrupting agony, like hanging TMI bunting all over the world. But for a day, I'd definitely like to see what I was missing.

I'd also like a bash at a blindfold smell'n'taste test - I am positive that, exposed to a series of well known smells, I would mega-fail at identifying most of them. I am more confident with identifying food; but if you blended them, so they no longer had texture or shape, I don't think that would be so easy. It would still be a fun afternoon.

(incidentally, pregnancy seems like a worse and worse idea - apparently the strains it puts on your body are well known for knocking your biology out of whack. This includes the appearance of coelic disease, and the sudden reappearance of a sense of smell...)