30 Days of Meme - Day Two

Your Favourite Film.

As I mentioned I don't have a favourite song. However there is one film I can point to as "Best Film Ever". I feel guilty that I've not seen it in ages, but it is over two hours long, doesn't have any exciting battles in it, and some of the best bits are memorable because they have no dialogue at all.

You just need to hear five notes from Strauss to know which film I mean. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke originally conceived of the two works (the book and the film) as two versions of the same story. In The Lost Worlds of 2001, he -only half jokingly- talks about the book as being by Clarke and Kubrick, and reverses the names for the film credits. However as is so often the case films get delayed and the book came out several years before the film did.

I first saw it when I was about 7. And I've loved it ever since.

As always lots of people have come up with all sorts of ideas about what its about, reading meaning into every frame. Frankly I can't be arsed with that. Its a cracking story about a computer that becomes unhinged. And I think I prefer not knowing what the monolith means. As with the other Arthur C. Clarke book about big mysterious objects Rendezvous with Rama the sequels, where you find out much more about what the object does, somehow take away from the original mystery. Its a sort of a reverse of Richard Feynman's quote (which I heartily agree with) about how understanding more about a flower only adds to its beauty.

But anyway, enough waffling, you want to see why. Well, frankly there are too many awesome scenes. The interviews, the "stargate" scene, the men in suits that inexplicably lost the Oscar to Planet of the Apes, etc. But for me there's one stand out scene. If you don't know which one it is then watch this...

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30 Days of Meme - Day 3

Your Favourite TV Programme

This is nearly as hard as the "favourite song" one. There have been so many. However I have a problem with a lot of fiction. Especially stuff like Lost, The X-Files, etc, etc, many of the best ones (or at least the ones with some of the best ideas- Dark Skies for instance) get cancelled way too soon. And the ones that don't? They drip on with massive, dull, largely incomprehensible story arcs that (as with the 2001 sequels I mentioned yesterday) seriously lose something in the development- they try and become comprehensible, and then my willing suspension of disbelief gives up and goes home. I can't help but feel that X-Files would have been better if the conspiracy had been left unexplained, like the contents of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction.

My fondest TV drama memories are getting home from school, and watching  Knightmare, and then a variety of Gerry Andersons (Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds) The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Pertwee era Doctor Who, that sort of thing in the early 1990s. That and waking up at 5:30 in the morning, aged about 7, and watching old OU programmes about insect biology and Once Upon A Time... Life, which hasn't aged as well as I remember, but has at least made it onto youtube.

So my favourite TV programmes are probably going to be documentaries. I loved Horizon, anything involving Davids Attenborough and Bellamy, Wildlife on One, The Natural World, and, going back a bit further Path of the Rain God about rivers in Belize, (I'd have loved to show you the clip of cave fish, but all I can find is a reference in the BFI catalogue) and, of course The Really Wild Show. (Is that still going?). I didn't see Cosmos until only a few years back, and can instantly see how that influenced a whole generation of scientists. (Sadly I never really had the mathematics skills, and animals always seemed to get more screentime than astronomy- I can only remember a couple of Channel 4 series with Heather Couper).

As everything is far too hard for me to decide I'll show you one of the most recent things David Attenborough did. The Blue Planet, and a series of sequences about deep-sea fishes.

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I've got to write about books tomorrow. Christ that'll be hard.