For those who have missed the story, we discovered yesterday that the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, personally writes a letter of condolence to the families of all those soldiers who die in combat. A generous and caring act you’d think, particularly in the past many grieving families would have merely received a type-written letter from the service concerned. Apparently however, the letter received by mother of serviceman Jamie Janes last week was an ‘insult‘ to her son’s memory as the PM’s handwriting leaves something to be desired. Gordon Brown as is well reported does suffer with problems with his eyesight which affects his handwriting. The fact that he still wanted to write personally to the families of servicemen should be to his credit, not used to criticize him.

Now, before I go any further, Mrs Janes has my every sympathy and nothing that anyone can say is going to mitigate her sadness at the loss of her son. When you are grieving there is a natural instinct to try and find someone to blame but it’s normally left to your friends and relations to comfort you, not for your statements to be broadcast across the nation. Mrs Janes is clearly very upset and angry, but it does neither her, her son, or the rest of the country any benefit to base policies on the feelings of one upset woman. To exploit her grief to sell newspapers and to attack the Prime Minister is, in my opinion, low, even by the standards of the Sun. To then extend the story over two days and take an illegally recorded telephone conversation and host it on their website is cynical and manipulative in the extreme.

Servicemen enter the armed forces knowing that there is a risk of injury or death in what they do. The fact that they still sign-up willingly to serve is to their great credit, but sadly in any war there will always be casualties. It does seem in this particular case that Guardsman Janes was picked up by a helicopter, but died on the way to hospital from his wounds. Tragic, but it does seem that in this particular case, all that could have been done, was done.

I am also disappointed that Gordon Brown feels that he has to schedule an enquiry to investigate the circumstances around Guardsman Janes’ death. Unless this is routinely done for the deaths of any British servicemen, scheduling one to try and deflect the attentions of the Sun is yet another knee-jerk reaction. Representational democracy exists to provide a stabilizing influence on the fickle wishes of the mob. If all they do is respond to the demagoguery of the tabloid press, then you wonder why there are there at all.

Frankenstein's Monster

If only Mary Shelley had given the monster a name then we would have been spared the horrible linguistic circumlocution we’re forced into just to refer to him, pedants would have a smug cause for complaint removed and overall the world would be a happier place.
Still, the nomenclature of the monster isn’t what I want to talk about today, but how did he become the square faced, green skinned, bolt necked monstrosity that we’ve all come to know and love?

The construction of Mary Shelley’s original monster is left to the imagination. The materials used unspecified, save a mention of the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter-house’ and he is large only because ‘the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed. There is no mention of the now standard elements of the tale; lightning storms, graveyard robbery, brain implants (from Mr Abi Normal) and certainly no neck bolts. Shelley’s monster is also perfectly capable of speech, far from the grunting in-erudite beast we have come to expect and gives long speeches in an attempt to win over his creator.

So, moving on from the novel, we turn to Hollywood. The first film production of Frankenstein was as early as 1910. Edison Studios produced a 12 minute film starring Charles Ogle as the monster. Ogle also apparently designed his own make-up, but his efforts bare little resemblance to what we would expect today.

For the modern look, we have to head forward to 1931 and the classic Universal studios adaptation. Boris Karloff starred, but credit for creating the classic monster look goes largely to the king of monster make-up, Jack Pierce. HIs monster has all the classic features: square head, brain insertion scar on the forehead and, most importantly, the bolts through the neck (actually electrodes used to conduct the electricity used to bring the monster to life). It is Jack Pierce who puts the pieces together to give us the monster’s iconic look.

Not content with creating one of the most enduring Halloween monster masks, Jack Pierce also gave us The Mummy, the first time we saw Imhotep, 67 years before the one who kidnapped Rachel Weisz and Universal’s 1941 Wolf Man, sticking yak hair onto Lou Chaney’s face to give us another Halloween classic.

Jack’s films were in black and white of course, so we can’t hang Frankenstein’s colour onto him. The first Frankenstein film to be made in colour was Hammer’s 1957 classic, The Curse of Frankenstein but the first time he seems to pick up a greenish tinge is in the 1970 Spanish film Los monstruos del terror. Watch the trailer and judge for yourself:

However, it’s more likely that his colour comes from the TV Show, The Munsters. While that was broadcast in black and white, many publicity photos were taken in colour, and Herman Munster has that expected green hue. It might not have even been intentional, different colours of make-up would have been used to achieve different shades of gray on screen and perhaps green just gave that corpse-like pallor they were after.

Still, much of the credit for our freakish favourites must stay with Jack. His star was to eventually fade at Universal, as modern latex masks which were cheaper and quicker to use gradually took the place of more traditional techniques, but this Halloween, while you’re getting dressed up, remember Jack Pierce, the man who gave us the Mummy’s bandages, the Wolf-Man’s facial hair and Frankenstein’s Monster’s bolt.

Monster eye

I showed in passing in my last post a quote from Douglas Adams:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Now, he was talking about the the perverse nature of religious belief to demonstrate that he felt it was unnecessary.  Religion isn’t the only source of beliefs however, particularly for children and there are far better books to get them from than the Bible.

I’m referring of course to fairy tales, those windows into a more magical world where the wild things are, the denizens of the dark cupboards, mysterious castles and long forgotten kingdoms who teach us that there are monsters out there in the world.  In our current society we seem to be losing the need for monsters.  We shelter our children from the frightening and the upsetting, censor their stories and hamstrung their villains into comical figures, easy for heroes to vanquish and then allow to escape, shaking their fist at the hero as if they had just taken the last biscuit from the packet rather than destroy their entire life’s plans.

Would Disney’s Cinderella have been a better story if the evil sisters had chopped off their toes to fit into her shoes and had their eyes pecked out?  What about the evil queen in Snow White?  Should she have danced in red-hot iron shoes until she died?  Possibly, it certainly would have shown the results of their wickedness in an easy to understand form.  What of Little Red Riding Hood?  In the original story both Red Riding Hood and Grandmother are devoured by the wolf, who gets off scot free.  A scary ending, but gets the point of the story across far better than relying on a woodcutter always being there to rescue you.

Our time as children is when we learn how to behave in the world and we do them no favours by sheltering them from its nastier side.  In fact, they are generally much more resilient than you’d expect.  Neil Gaiman, an author who doesn’t shelter us from the frightening, found that adults generally find his book, Coraline, creepier than kids do.  [Neil incidentally has just been awarded the Newbery medal in the US for The Graveyard Book which is gloriously full of monsters.  Perhaps this is a turning point?]

These stories teach us that it is ok to be scared and brave when you face those fears and do something anyway.  That there are times when you win and times when you don’t and without the latter, the former wouldn’t exist.  For without monsters there is no cost to defeat and, without cost, there are no challenges, and without challenges, no thrill in victory or sadness in failure, just the grey depths of uniformity.

To end on another quote, this time from G.K. Chesterton:

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

Photo: © TCMHitchhiker Creative Commons License

Atheist Bus

It all started with an article in The Guardian concerning religious advertising on the side of buses.  The author was irritated that while normally you need to provide evidence to back up your claims for adverts, it was apparently acceptable for this one to point people to a website which proclaimed that unless you accept God into your life:

You will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell. Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire which was prepared for the devil and all his angels (demonic spirits) (Matthew 25: 41).

Apparently quoting from the Bible on an advert is fine and since the rest of the content was on a website, that’s out of the Advertising Standards Authority’s  (ASA) domain.  The author then suggested that if you could raise £23,400 then you could run an atheistic advert on the side of a bendy-bus for two weeks in London.  The phrasing

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life

was proposed, since the use of the word ‘probably’ protected Carlsberg from litigation and a Just Giving campaign created to try and raise the money.  The British Humanist Association agreed to administer the scheme, Richard Dawkins agreed to match all donations up to a maximum of £5,500 pounds and a target total of £11,000 was set, enough to run two sets of atheist adverts on 30 London buses for four weeks.

Atheist Tube Advert

From there, to say the campaign was successful would be slightly understating it.  To date, they have raised £150,485, just slightly over the original target (by 2400%!) and the adverts have now spread across the UK and onto the London Underground.

The campaign hasn’t been without detractors however.  One bus driver in Southampton has refused to drive any buses carrying the commercial and is being accommodated by his employers (I hope for their sake that they don’t have vegetarians refusing to drive buses advertising animal products, pacifists with buses advertising the army or even atheists refusing to drive around religious adverts or they could be facing a scheduling nightmare!).

The most entertaining objections have come from the Christian Voice and their representative, Stephen Green.  They launched an objection, to the ASA saying that ‘the advertisments (sic) break the ASA’s codes on substantiation and truthfulness‘, presumably completely missing the irony inherent in that statement.  That left us with the potentially fascinating eventuality of the ASA being required to determine the existence or not of God, a trial which would have topped even Scopes.

Wisely, but disappointingly for those of use looking forward to seeing the proofs of God’s existence, the ASA declined to get involved, saying that the advert wasn’t in breach of the code.

The ASA Council concluded that the ad was an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation. Although the ASA acknowledges that the content of the ad would be at odds with the beliefs of many, it concluded that it was unlikely to mislead or to cause serious or widespread offense.

The Christian Voice’s response to this was eyebrow raising by any standards:

‘If the ASA had thought the humanists could provide evidence for their claim, they would have asked them for it. As they know there is no evidence for the proposition that ‘there is probably no God’, they have let their secularist friends off the hook. ‘I debated this issue secularists five times in recent days, and despite repeated challenges, they could not once come up with anything to back up their claim that there is ‘probably no God’.

‘We always knew the ASA was just another tool of the politically-correct secularist establishment, but here’s the proof. Their ruling is a good example of how the deck is stacked against Christians today, and the Church needs to wake up to the anti-Christian agenda right now.

I’m not exactly sure how Stephen Green expected the ASA to prove either the existence or non-existence of God, but to say that by not upholding his complaint they are ‘letting their secularist friends off the hook‘, you have to wonder how he was planning to prove that God does exist.  I can’t prove that there isn’t an invisible elephant (which is undetectable by all known means) sitting in my front room at the moment, but I’d say that the balance of probabilities suggests that there isn’t.

However, rather than just leave it there, he manages also to get a dig in at homosexuality

‘On ‘taste and decency’, the ASA have simply taken a subjective decision to dismiss the complaints of offensiveness. On planet ASA, complaints from people of faith are not given the same weight as those from secularists. But what do you expect when the ASA council is appointed and run by a campaigning homosexual, Chris, Lord, Smith of Finsbury?’

And what about all those pesky teenagers who might want to protect themselves against cervical cancer?

Last week, it ruled against an advertorial Christian Voice placed in the New Statesman, after just one solitary complaint that a prediction that every Government initiative on teenage sexuality would increase teenage infertility could not be substantiated.

That ‘advertorial‘ said:

‘There is a Biblical principle that we reap what we sow. It applies to nations as well as to individuals. What politicians sow, the people reap. When politicians sow evil, the people reap misery, and the poorest reap it the worst”. The ad went on to describe the detrimental impact of government policies and legislation on society. It included the text “Now we have the disaster of teenage infertility. Every government initiative, including the HPV vaccine, will increase it, but as all the targets revolve around pregnancy, no-one in power knows how many young people they are making sterile and nobody cares”.’

Those interfering secularists at the ASA demanded

‘robust, scientific evidence that the HPV vaccine caused infertility in teenagers’

Scientific evidence?  How unreasonable.  After all, look where we’d end up if we relied on that:

‘It is a good job the Advertising Standards Authority was not around when the Old Testament was written, or we would be missing half the Christmas story. The ASA would have wanted Isaiah to substantiate his claim that ‘a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son’ (Isa 7:14). They would have demanded ‘robust, scientific evidence’ that virgins can conceive.

Yep, that one might have come up in the Atheist bus ruling too, except of course that’s a mistranslation anyway.  Funny how atheists seem to know more about the Bible than many believers, but we’re getting off the point.

According to the Christian Voice:

the secularists will take us further down the road to their hell on earth.

But it seems to me so far in this campaign, all the atheists have done is encouraged people to

Stop worrying and enjoy your life

Whereas Christian Voice seem to be the ones doing all the condemning.  In any case, the campaign seems to be spreading worldwide now, so Stephen Green had better get used to it.

It’s only fair to point out that other, more sensible, religious groups have welcomed the campaign:

..the Methodist Church said it thanked Professor Dawkins for encouraging a “continued interest in God”.
Spirituality and discipleship officer Rev Jenny Ellis said: “This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life.”
She added: “Christianity is for people who aren’t afraid to think about life and meaning.”

That’s having confidence in the robustness of your belief at least.

Bus advert photo: © Jon Worth / British Humanist Association
Tube advert photo: Loz Flowers / Flickr / Creative Commons

This is the first one I’ve seen that seems scary enough for the book.

I’ve been hoping that the movie would manage to preserve the air of fairy-tale menace that the story conjures up so I’m now optimistic that the film should be great too. Is it just me or does that doorway seem somewhat reminiscent of Being John Malkovich though?

Michael Caine revealed the original plan from the script was to switch on the engine and burn off the petrol from the tank until the reduced weight allowed the coach to right itself, but the Royal Society of Chemistry was interested in seeing if there were any better ideas out there.  They issued a challenge to see if anyone could come up with any other solutions to how the gang might have escaped safely with the gold.

This week, they published their shortlist of the five top solutions.

They are, in short:

• Smashing the glass from the windows, draining the fuel tank and letting the tyres down
• Loading up the back with rocks
• Dissolving the gold with acid made from the explosives in the coach and their urine
• Melting the asphalt on the road so the bus would stick to it
• Moving further to the front of the coach to allow someone to go forward and pull the gold back

The official winner is announced on Friday.  Incidentally, use of helicopters as a solution was explicitly banned.

[Edit:  Listen Again links will have expired by now, but Jonathan has copies of the audio in his blog]

The panel were asked (it’s from about 46.18 on Listen Again for this week’s episode)

What kind of dog do you hope the Obama family bring to the White House?

There were various suggestions and then Christopher Hitchens replied:

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. That would mean I would say an Irish Setter.

When asked why, he replied.

Stupid, highly strung, but dead loyal.

A perfectly reasonable answer you’d think? Wikipedia does say that contrary to popular opinion, Irish Setters aren’t stupid, but that does at least confirm that Hitchens’ view is a common one. Presumably the worst response you might expect would be from an Irish Setter lover to defend their intelligence.

No, apparently not, as someone then actually phoned in to ‘Any Answers’ to say (at about 27.22 on iPlayer)

I’m really concerned that the BBC allowed the word stupid and the word Irish to be broadcast in the same sentence. As you may know the racial stereotype of the Irish is that we are stupid so I’m really surprised. I did complain about this last night I phoned the BBC made a complant about it and asked if it could be edited out. Just that word, just the word Irish which could have easily been done. Christopher Hitchen’s didn’t say Setter, he said Irish setter..

Yes, amazingly someone actually managed to take a comment about a breed of dog and turn it into a racial slur.

An Irish Setter

Jonathan Dimbleby attempted to placate her by again pointing out that he was talking about a dog (and that editing things out of a live programme is problematic) but she was having none of it.

No, the point is, if you’re actually broadcasting a stereotype like that, that the Irish are stupid..

He tries again, this time ‘with great humility‘ to placate her but she then tries to link this into a series of slights against the Irish with the Government trying to remove them as a nationality from the census!

Just how big a chip on your shoulder do you have to have to take comments about a breed of dog and make them a derogatory attack on your nationality?  It’s a good thing no-one mentioned German Shepherds or the German farming lobby would have been blockading Broadcasting House!

[Update:  Judging by some of the comments on the BBC Radio 4 Message board she's not the only one.  What's wrong with you people?]

Image © Brian Snelsdon Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence

The Clangers of course were famous for disproving all that nonsense about NASA actually landing on the moon and speaking from a written script with Swanee whistles.

The original dialogue was virtually indecipherable, which didn’t stop Postgate getting into trouble when a BBC executive correctly divined that for one clanger he’d written the line: “Oh sod it, the bloody thing won’t open”.

[Edit: In case you were wondering, it's in this episode.. ]

Bagpuss gave us Professor Yaffle, the Marvellous Magical Mouse-Organ and that saggy old cloth cat who everybody loved.  Surprisingly there were only ever 13 episodes, it certainly seems like more to my childhood memory.  Ivor the Engine taught us that dragons live in Wales, and deemed that forevermore steam engines will go psss-chi-cuff, psss-chi-cuff.

R.I.P. Oliver, thanks for making the world a little more surreal and a lot more friendly.

Now, who do we need to ballot at the BBC to make them repeat them all?

Well, today a case in the European Court has found that the UK government uses the database in a “blanket and indiscriminate way“  with a “disproportionate interference into private life“.

The case was brought by two people, one of whom was 11 (or 12, depending on which report you read) when charged, but not convicted, of theft.  Holding information on innocent people, the court ruled, carried the “risk of stigmatisation” and that the state had overstepped the mark by retaining the information.

Hopefully the government will now be forced to remove any records for people who were never found guilty of a crime.

Interestingly, the BBC are already scaremongering over the issue, pointing out on their TV news coverage that the man convicted of the murders of several prostitutes in Ipswich, Steve Wright, was caught because his DNA was on the database from a previous conviction for theft.   “If he hadn’t been convicted“, we are warned, “and his profile had been deleted, he might have killed again “.  Shades of “if you haven’t done anything wrong then you’ve nothing to hide” there from the Beeb.

Yet another reason to be glad that we’re in the EU and a chance to hear that phrase that brings joy to the heart;

Jacqui Smith, said she was “disappointed”