No Strings Attached

As seems to happen at the end of the year, a few notable folk have shuffled off their coils. Notably, Jack Klugman threw a seven only days after I'd written about him on this here blog. James Roday may want to feel nervous about now.

However, it was the death of Gerry Anderson that touched me most. Kids today may find it hard to believe, but even in the early 1980s, a TV show featuring a bunch of puppets could still bring a sense of awe from a youngster.

Thunderbirds is the one most people remember, and it was ace, as was Stingray. I did think Joe 90 was a load of tosh. But the best by some distance was always Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. It was totally fantastic and even today, if by chance it happens to be on somewhere, I'll make an effort to see it.

For one thing, it had a heavy sci-fi element, which has always had a sway over me. To whit: at some point in the future, humanity has managed to jaunt over to Mars. Seeing alien buildings, the idiot astros panic and open fire, somewhat understandably pissing off the locals to the degree they declare war on Earth and take one of the hapless humans as their unwilling slave.

The trick the Martians (only ever seen as glowing rings of light and a deep voice) have mastered is being able to identically duplicate anything - but first, as the introduction states - they must DESTROY. Thus, they quickly knock off top SPECTRUM agent Captain Scarlet, recreate him as a slave and send him off to assassinate the World Prez. However, the plot is foiled and the Cap somehow regains his human consciousness, surprisingly being welcomed back into the fold by Colonel White as our main weapon in the war against the Mysterons - mainly because he has now become "virtually indestructible", an ability that would see him meet and brush off various grisly fates.

What we never got a sense of was how Scarlet felt about all this. After all, it seemed clear to me that he was nothing but a duplicate of somebody who has been killed - an idea later revived (ho ho) in Red Dwarf with the character of Rimmer. Yet never once did we get any sense of existential despair from knowing that his memories weren't actually his.

Perhaps it's reading too much into it. In any case, the show looked great and had some top storylines. A lot of these featuring around the man the Mysterons gang-pressed into their service: Captain Black. Always dressed in dark clothes, eyes that looked like he hadn't slept in weeks - if they ever make a film version of the series, then I would humbly suggest myself for the role.

I was born for the part!

On top of all this, it always had a superb theme tune. Check it out and sing along at home:

"They crash him, and his body may burn

They smash him, but they know he'll return -

TO LIVE AGAIN!"

We Are Detective, We Are Select

Or so said the Thompson Twins, in their slightly odd 80s hit. Liars all, for we now know they weren't detectives at all, but pop stars. The following is a list of people who weren't crime fighters either, because they don't exist. However, they do all feature in some top TV shows.

Ironside
Sure, you may be San Francisco's top cop, but a bullet in the spine is always going to put a crimp in your day. Despite his jogging days being over, Robert T. Ironside dons his wheelchair and carries on cracking down on crime, assisted by (alongside a top Quincy Jones theme tune) the slightly bumbling Ed, posh girl working with plod Eve and young neer-do-well trying to turn good Mark.

Initially running in the late 60s, Ironside had to deal with the changing times. One episode had the team visiting a house full of hippy layabouts, one of whom describes our hero as "fuzz on wheels". To his credit, the man doesn't call on a bunch of cops armed with bats to crack some skulls and keep all their stash to help with his pain management.

Some 20 years later, the cast all got back together for a dodgy TV movie made not long before Raymond Burr shuffled off his mortal coil. It wasn't very good.

Quincy
Your favourite coroner, however, had no time for the modern fashions. Infamously, Quince once put down "punk rock" as a cause of death in an episode worth watching just for cheap giggles. Seriously, see it sometime soon.

These people are punks, apparently. Well, except Quincy. Obviously

Despite not having a first name, Dr Quincy M.E. managed to balance his personal life of pissing about on a yacht with young ladies, his normal work duties of cutting up corpses and solving a neverending stream of murders on the streets of LA.

This was lucky for his cop friends, Monaghan and Brill, who were so inept they made Chief O'Hara from Batman look like Sherlock Holmes. Every week, they would dismiss the Doc's suspicions of foul play, only for the evidence to stack up. Luckily, Quincy's boss, Dr Aston, tolerated his extracurricular activities, despite the growing number of dead bodies stacking up down the morgue.

KITT
Can it, Hasselhoff! The car was the real star of Knight Rider, and my five-year-old self will hear no different. The guy in the stupidly tight jeans was only needed to go round up the bad guys when it involved going indoors.

For one thing, KITT (or the Knight Industries Two Thousand, if you weren't around in the 1980s) was probably the coolest looking car ever seen on TV. See?

Cool as fuck

Plus he had the best theme tune you could wish. Brilliant. And you could play Pac-Man with him. I mean, what more do you want? He solves crime, has a line in banter, and he can get you home from the pub when you're totally blasted.

Jethro Gibbs
Silver-haired fox Gibbs takes no shite from nobody: as a former Marine sniper, he's probably ventilated more heads then you've had hot dinners. Subsequently swapping the uniform to solve crimes in the US navy as part of NCIS, you can be assured that if you're a dead sailor, he'll get to the bottom of it. And pray to your god if you've been mean to a little kid, because you'll be in for a heavy duty smackdown.

Gibbs may well be on this list because I aspire to be like him - as my hair greys, he's proof that it's a look that can be pulled of and like me, he has a weakness to red haired women. All I need is a team including a wisecracking womaniser, an ex-Israeli assassin, a computer geek and a perky goth covered in tattoos and I'm away.

Shawn Spencer
Save the best till last. Star of the best show of the last 20 years (Psych), Shawn uses his outstanding skills of observation and deduction to doss a living from solving crime.

Why is he great? Well, he's an idle git who'd rather be lazing in bed, listening to Tears for Fears while waiting for the Royal Rumble to start. What's not to like? Luckily, in terms of his career, he has a supportive best friend, Gus, and an ex-cop dad able to help under, albeit under some duress.

Add 80s pop reference here

It's all brilliant, and I seem to find myself recommending it to everyone I meet. Sherlock? Get away with you! Psych is funnier, brilliant guest stars (Cary Elwes! Judd Nelson! Ally Sheedy!) and a better looking cast. I still don't get why he didn't chase after the character played by Rachel Leigh Cook, though.

Let Your Feet Do The Talking

Shoes: they're a vital part of life. Especially if you live in parts of the world where there is plenty around that you don't want your naked feet to step in.

This is doubly so at this time of year, if you live in Northern England - the right choice of footwear is all important to personal comfort. That wise old sage Joe Strummer once noted you should wear shoes made either for running, or fighting. Now, given I have the combat skills of an elderly Thora Hird, I've tended to stick with comfortable fitting sneakers, which also have the advantage of looking good.

At this time of year, however, they're just not good enough. Heavy rain creates puddles that are regularly not stopped in time to avoid a soaked sock situation, which as we all know, is always very unpleasant. Add to that the problem of an icy pavement ensuring a nasty (and embarrassing) fall is always around the corner unless you're properly equipped.

With that, we can turn to another example of German efficiency: the Doctor Marten boot. With a couple of them on your feet, you're set for anything the English weather can throw at you. I actually came to them fairly late on, only buying a pair when I was off to visit the Baltic in wintertime. But since then, they've proved to be a vital friend: four years on, they're still in top nick and you can stomp through ice and rain with no worry of getting your toes cold.

But if you want to hear the true beauty of a pair of these wonderful boots, I think Alexi Sayle does it best.

Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Or Gun.

So, you wait six years for a game and when you know it's finally coming, your expectation goes through the roof. Can it meet expectation? Obviously not.

Actually, that may be a little unfair on Hitman: Absolution. It was fun to play through, just not the kind of fun I wanted from it. Over the first decade of this millennium, the Hitman franchise had established itself on the Playstation 2-era as offering superb gaming, engaging us to examine situations as best we could to pull off the perfect hit. I can remember spending hours outside of gaming musing on an area, wondering how to get in and out unseen with the target eliminated.

With that in mind, my heart raced at the possibilities the next generation of console gaming would offer the makers. I envisioned puzzles so complex my head would explode at the thought of doing Agent 47 justice. Instead, we got a fairly good stealth thriller.

The story: Agent 47 is a genetically-warped freak who has made a nice living from being the world's top contract killer. At the start of the game, he's sent by the International Contract Agency (his constant employers) to knock off his former handler, Diane, as she's gone rogue. But in a series of somewhat tired plot clichés, he's subsequently entrusted with the task of protecting a teenage girl (ehhh...) in a stupid school uniform (oh, please) who is wanted by a psychotic redneck businessman and the pissed-off big cheese back at ICA. Thus, you can gather the rest.

The story actually bugs several times, as we get 47 making schoolboy mistakes you wouldn't expect of him that allow him to get out-thought by characters best described as fucking inbred idiots. Plus we have the worrying spectre of the characters known as "The Saints" - young women dressed in S&M nun outfits. It comes across as little but wank fantasy and offers the best part of fuck all to proceedings.

Let's be kind about the good things: this game looks amazing. The locations, the cut scenes - it matches the level set by games like Max Payne 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution in presentation levels. Plus the voice acting is a good level - Powers Booth and Keith Carradine are suitably hatstand as the bad guys and we can thank the Gaming Gods that they got David Bateson back in to voice 47, after initially deciding otherwise. The dude simply is the character, and his cold, emotionless tones hide the deeper anger the character feels but cannot express.

When the game gives us what we want, it excels. There are a handful of times we are given a wide area with a target and told to kill them. Naturally, we can wade in guns akimbo, but the challenge is to execute the perfect hit, which is how the game should be. But it feels a rare treat, as mostly we are given a room/area and essentially told to go from one side to the other, preferably with the most stealth as possible.

I've read reviews since I finished the game, and agree with the feeling that this strays far too much from what we expect of these games and into Splinter Cell land. It may look great, and even play well (there is a certain satisfaction from timing your runs to perfection to avoid a guard's movement) but it's not what we signed up for when we bought the game.

Despite all that, I hope they make another Hitman game and perhaps go back to the roots that made the series so compelling in the first place. We want the chance to use our imagination to knock off some poor piece of shite scum, then walk out as calm as you like. Not a quasi-stealth game with a Hollywood b-movie plot stuck to it.

Bald of Awesome, shame about the game

Not Managing to Keep Up

I've been far, far too lazy on the blogging front. I've got my excuses: right now, work is fucking me off to the point I have little inclination for typing away in my evenings. Plus, of course has seen the news that some royal has been succesfully impregnated means I will have to play the national anthem 20 times every night.

Alright, so I don't actually give a toss about some over-privileged tosspots expecting another freeloading parasite. The real reason I haven't wrote 'owt is that I bought Football Manager 2013. As any one who has dared enter this world knows, you don't escape easily. It's even pulled me away from Hitman: Absolution, of which more when I finally get round to finishing it.

As it is, I've an unbeaten run to protect. Whenever I re-enter the world of Football Manager, I always play a game as Manchester United to get my bearings before engaging on a proper challenge with a bunch of non-league no-hopers, like Workington. So far, I've managed to get close to Christmas with an impressive sequence of results, leaving the league table looking like this:

Have that one, Fergie! Sack off all those other pretenders - clearly I'm the man for the job when they drag your body out of Old Trafford.

Rapid Recollection Decline

I'm not sure the old adage "your memory plays tricks on you" holds water until you get past a certain age - that point where childhood becomes a golden age of innocence and fun until part of you snaps you back to the realisation that it was actually just really fucking boring. Moments of fun out with your mates that make up  1% of your life between having to stay in because it was raining. Again.

It's like I wonder if I really did actually watch the 1990 FA Cup final, or just think I did because I've seen the goals countless times since. Why can't I remember Kurt Cobain killing himself, when I was 13 years old at the time? Can I really not remember anything from a six month gap in early 1995?

Problems with recollection hit me the other day when I was thinking of a record store I used to frequent in my 18 months or so of living in Aldershot. For those unfamiliar, it is a small town maybe an hour on the train South West of London, most famous for it housing the barracks of a large number of soldiers. When I think of the place, I remember the last time someone punched me and, by no coincidence, it being the last time I punched somebody else. People with Northern accents were not popular.

It had a couple of decent places to buy music, though. Plus an Our Price. One was a small shop located in the nightmarish vestige of the shopping centre (of sorts) in the town centre. I think I bought Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys, Otis Blue and Shine 5 on cassettes for a fiver there. It may well have been a fire sale, as it closed down shortly afterwards.

There was also a cool little video game store, for some reason labouring until the terrible name of 'Kart Klub'. I bought a Playstation 2 there, and the guy behind the counter recommended some horrific RPG game that involved vampires in a mansion the size of Ohio, apparently, which was enough to make me suspect their judgement was duff.

But anyway, the other record store, my brain tells me, was called Spinna Disc. Or I think so. The internet seems to support this but when I try to find it on Google streetview I just come across some pizza takeaway place. And isn't that depressing in a way? But then I worry that perhaps it never existed in the first place and my memory is false. Honestly, I'm worried I'm becoming an unreliable narrator in my own life.

Music to Make Me a Mad Man

Meanwhile, back in the real world, not one currently being invaded by aliens (see last post for details), I've had my tolerance for it shortened by hearing an abomination of a cover version the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart by someone called Paloma Faith.

I'd never heard of the lady in question before, and I'm sure she's a nice enough lady who loves her mam, but her reading of the song is (to these ears) a complete fucking disaster. For one thing, you're onto a loser by going up against Michael Hutchence: the guy was complete sex on legs and the best rock icon of the 1980s, so Faith has no chance of getting close in those stakes. Secondly, the arrangement of the song is tired arse gravy and she even seems to struggle to hit the notes from the original.

But what really stoked up my wish for Immediate Nuclear Holocaust was the whole bag o' shite was put out due to an advert campaign by British department store chain John Lewis. This is part of a trend of adverts using "contemporary" versions of 80s classics, usually in some acoustic fashion. I'm not saying it's a bad thing in the scale of human suffering, but the people behind it need to be tracked down and stopped.

I think the whole mess began, oddly enough, with an actual indie popster. Fyfe Dangerfield, best known as singer from Guillemots, did a version of Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman that got picked up for a particularly gruesome John Lewis Christmas campaign ad. Given I hate the works of Joel, this didn't bother me too much.

However, when it was Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want being sacrificed at the alter of Don Draper wannabes everywhere, something needed to be done. I know it isn't illegal, and it isn't really doing any harm, but I still find my blood boiling whenever I hear these songs anywhere.

Perhaps the problem is that all these young stage-school trained singers don't have anyone writing songs for them anymore. In the first days of pop, you had the whole Brill Building teams knocking out songs by the hour. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman churned out loads of hits for the glam rock bands, Stock, Aitken and Waterman did the whole production line approach in the 1980s.

But I can't think of any modern equivalent. This is the age of the Simon Cowell-type figure, who has the talent brought to them live on TV, before moulding them in the fashion of the day and binning them off when the next thing comes along - wither Shayne Ward? And while Cowell might have many talents, writing songs is not one. So they naturally just run through rock and pops back pages, offering slightly modernised versions of the classics.

Then when you need something with a bit of edge for a more serious project such as selling Christmas presents, luckily all those old alternative classics will do a good job. The way things are, I expect Dead Souls to be used in life insurance ads within the end of the decade.