Ham and Spamalot

We went to see the touring production of Spamalot at the weekend. We never got around to seeing the West End production, so against our better judgement we went to see the offerings put forth for us lowly provincials. This is a writing blog, so i'm not going to comment at length on the production itself, save to say that the inevitably smaller budget and scale quite obviously detracted from the string of big production numbers which flesh out the show, and that some of the cast weren't quite up to it.

So to the writing. I grew up with Monty Python, and can contribute worthily to any (mercifully rare) Python recital (Obligatory xkcd). I was open to the idea of the material being worked into a musical, and interested to see how the writer integrated the recycled/reworked material into the show. I'd listened to the soundtrack and knew roughly what to expect, and was content to compensate for the smaller production.

The show is basically chunks of Holy Grail floating in a puddle of Broadway parody and self-parody, with only token attempts made to integrate the two. For the former, I had a very similar sense to when I saw Tomfoolery done by Kit & the Widow - excellent and well-loved material done slightly less well than the original, with occasional sparks of the performers finding a new effect within it. For the latter, Forbidden Broadway have already torn The Song That Goes Like This to shreds (Spotify link), and I saw little originality in the other numbers. True, it is the nature of parody to imitate, but Diva's Lament was done in 1896 by Gilbert & Sullivan (The Grand Duke), and it was just as incongruous and ineffective then. You won't succeed in showbiz (a UK rework of You won't succeed on Broadway [if you don't have any Jews]) was funny, but it was little more than a string of cheap X-Factor references, leaving rather a sense of playing to the lowest common denominator.

There was little in the way of plot or character development (admittedly true also of the film). A few attempts at pathos are stitched into Act 2 (I'm all alone, and the inevitable Always Look on the Bright Side), but could have been cut altogether without affecting the "journey" of the characters, for the simple reason that they were the journey. Nothing happened outside the numbers, worthy though they were, to suggest that they fitted into the show.

So what are left with? Some funny and silly sketches (mostly familiar to most of the audience) knitted together with big-spectacle production numbers, lowbrow topical gags, camp humour, explicit crossing of the fourth wall, a cringeworthy scene of an audience member dragged on stage, scripted corpsing, and a sing-a-long at the end. Spamalot is a pantomime. An enjoyable one, to be sure, but little more sophisticated than the average Puss in Boots. It sends itself up without ever parodying anything which hasn't been done a dozen times before. Watching it was like eating a fondant fancy; sweet, colourful, and ultimately unsatisfying.

Wildely Inappropriate

(I had a hankering for attempting an Oscar Wilde pastiche, and having a stab at his particular style of densely-packed paradox. Today's government spending review seemed an interesting setting. It's not exactly Wilde quality, but I threw this together on a coach in a couple of hours, so one can't expect miracles. A fun project. Like Henry Wotton, views expressed are not necessarily my own, or indeed anybody's.)

WILDELY INAPPROPRIATE

A Spending Review Pastiche

"Ah, David, so good of you to drop by. Can I offer you a drink?"

"Delighted to. One should never engage in a conversation about money if one is sober enough to understand it." With that he flung himself into a wing-backed armchair and took out his cigarette case.

"Whisky or brandy?" said George, and spun the top half of the globe-shaped drinks cabinet.

"I always suspected it: your model world revolves around alcohol", said David as George's globe clicked open to reveal a cluster of expensive bottles. "He who drinks whisky never wants to taste anything else. He who drinks brandy never can."

They clinked glasses, and George sat in the opposite armchair.

"This plan of yours, is it colourful?" said David.

"Colour is unique to the beholder. I cannot look at the bleak hues of this Talisker or the sanguine of this chair and be sure that you see the same. There are as many shades of purple as there are eyes, and in that sense my plan is to the Harlequin as he to the chessboard."

"Capital. Anything which is bad for the public should be colourful so they don't notice how bad it is. Anything which is good for them should be dreary so they don't notice it at all."

"I saw your speech about the armed forces. Very courageous", said George.

"Courage is the triumph of the necessary over the unpleasant. A soldier knows nothing of pleasantness, and forgets everything of necessity. He is the perfect citizen."

"Two aircraft carriers?"

"A strong navy is the envy of its enemies. A stronger one doesn't have any. We shall fill our carriers with American stealth aircraft, which are like thieves. A thief sneaks up on you and empties your wallet; an American aircraft empties your wallet so you can sneak up on everyone else. Enough of this - if a military doesn't shoot you to death, it bores you to death. That is its distinguishing characteristic. Tell me of of your budget plan."

"Well," said George, "my plan is a thing of rare beauty, which is to say that its beauty is scarce within it, but the whole is the more beautiful for it. I cannot abide things which are beautiful throughout, the perpetual ravages of sensual bliss cloy in my eyes. No, the most beautiful gallery is one with a handful of beautiful paintings among a multitude of mediocre ones; that way they have a crowd to stand above, and a darkness to shine from. My budget is minutely crafted on these aesthetic principles. It is beautiful only because of its studied lack of beauty."

"What, then, is its ugliest painting?" said David, extinguishing his cigarette and leaving it smouldering in the ashtray.

"I had no choice but to cut half a million jobs from the public sector."

"I wouldn't worry about that. A public sector worker has a job for life, and has no life at all. I would trust my life to any of them, but I don't have one either, so I instead trust them with my job. A nation shouldn't make work for idle hands, that is the devil's job, and he alone will never be unemployed." David spun his wedding-ring around on its finger.

"The funding to the police has been cut."

"Any nation which needs a police force doesn't deserve one."

"We will abolish dozens of quangos" said George, refilling their glasses.

"We cannot make up our minds whether we have quangos, but we have them to help us make up our minds. A quango should know everything and say nothing, while the government says everything and knows nothing. As soon as they know everything, they must be destroyed. They are the notebooks of a nation; to be written on, then written off. What of the BBC?"

"The BBC is a true work of art, and every other broadcaster in the world fills out the gallery from which it shines. I worship its beauty, and like any worshipper I sully it by my very worship. It is the priest who sullies his religion, the bishop doubly so; thus my worship of the BBC must inevitably destroy it, and its burning embers may I in time douse with my tears." George stared at the lavish wallpaper opposite. "Such a pity."

"And the other home nations?"

"Affected equally."

"Good. England is a nation crippled by its superiority. Wales invented its superiority, Scotland's inferiority is its strength, and both halves of Northern Ireland are inferior to each other. The result is a Britain possessing an inferiority superior to all other nations." David emptied his glass.

"The crowning beauty was that I cut less than the other side said they would." said George.

"I've a very poor opinion of a Chancellor who can't give you nothing and make you thank him for the privilege".

Pollution and your World

Been a while since last post, here is a short thought.

When writing a long-running series, there's a fine balance to strike between stagnation and pollution. By this I mean that a 30-book series, or a 7-season TV show, can go a bit stale if nothing changes from one episode to another. There's not a lot of world you can explore in 30 books that you can't in 20, at least without sacrificing some coherence. One the flip-side of this is allowing things to change too much, and to lose that thing which made them interesting in the first place.

I have two examples of this. 1) Dwarfs in Discworld, 2) Ferengi in Star Trek Deep Space 9.

The dwarfs have always had a strong 'racial' identity. Short, bearded, iron helmet, axes, apparent genderlessness. This makes them interesting, and TP has explored the mismatch between their culture and "ours" (or his version of it) to great effect. Part of this exploration took place through the development of Cheery into Cheri (i.e. an openly-female dwarf), and there were some funny scenes along the way (Cheri in ball-gown with sequinned axe in Fifth Elephant springs to mind). Alas, in Unseen Academicals we see the solo renegade become but a puff within winds of change blowing through mainstream dwarf society.

This, for me, killed the dwarfs as a point of interest.

Suddenly they aren't a unique race any more, but rather are morphing into versions of 'normal' humans. Suddenly, the differences which defined them and made them interesting are being discarded, and with it any dramatic interest in them.

DS9 made the same mistake with the Ferengi. For Cheri read Quark and his family. For sympathetic leader (Low King) read The Nagus. For open gender read loss of obsessive capitalism, and, yes, measures of gender equality (incidentally, for 'gold' read 'latinum' and the races don't look so different). Quark was an interesting character, and the Ferengi an interesting race precisely because they are so different from us. The Ferengi went on to lose all credibility by turning into poor copies of humans, and with it the world they inhabited became polluted.

These examples are from long-running series, but the grander scale serves only to amplify a point which applies to all writing - let your characters develop, but not so much that they cease to be what defined them in the first place. Don't let Wooster get married. Don't let Elizabeth become soppy. Don't let Frankenstein's monster join the Reform Club.

The cake is a lie - Thoughts on Portal, and on Art

A recent promotion made the game Portal available free of charge for a short time. Having heard favourably of, but never played, it I jumped at the chance of downloading it. My days as a hardcore gamer are some years behind me, but I still enjoy the occasional dabble. Most games are derivative and witless, but occasionally a nugget, pure, perfect and wonderful to behold, emerges from the often-cynical and commercial computer games industry.

Portal is a puzzle game, built on the first-person perspective engine used in Half Life 2. There is no combat and no (moving) antagonists as is usually the case with shooters, but the well-polished game engine is used instead as the stage for the big idea of the game. This idea is simple, elegant, and original. The player's only tool is a gun which fires two of the eponymous portals at walls, floors, ceilings, or other flat surfaces. The player can then walk/jump/fall into one portal and emerge from the other. On this simple premise are built a series of puzzles where the player must navigate around the level using a combination of walking and portals, manipulating boxes, switches and so on, using the gun in ever more cunning ways. The puzzles are challenging without being overly difficult, and are very rewarding to solve.

The relevance of this to an ostensible writing blog is as a model for manipulating user/audience experience - to my mind the central tenet of good writing. Portal does this superbly; the learning curve is very carefully plotted, and through the majority of the game the player is being trained in the various uses of the portal gun, and on how to react to the stimuli they are carefully fed. The developers' commentary is a study in usability and usability testing, and it is fascinating to see all the subtle touches they added to the game to make the player behave as they were intended to. They have painstakingly identified the ways in which players misunderstood their environment or the correct path through it, and manipulated that environment to avoid this, making sure a player will only ever spend time on the puzzle and not get stuck on irrelevances. I completed it in 3 hours without feeling that they'd lost control of me, but at all times feeling that I was in control of my own destiny - this is a very difficult balance to strike, and they got it bang on.

If forced to define art in its broadest sense I would opt for something approximate to "a work created to lead its audience along a path of thoughts and emotions". However nebulous or individual may that path be, the creator contrives his/her work so as to provide it. Art, to my mind, is inherently centred on the audience and their journeys along its myriad paths. Without an intended audience, the never-to-be-read book or the unseen painting is little more than a complicated form of masturbation on the part of its creator. There is nothing wrong with this - creating things for the sake of creating them can be immensely pleasurable - but a work lacking even a tacit acknowledgement of its audience is completely missing the point of art. It is also likely to be very poor (as I've written before, Bletchley Park falls into this pit).

I try to approach writing by planning the path which the audience will take, and then laying down the words/direction/notes in such a way as to manipulate the audience along that path. Portal is a first-class example of this approach, and anyone with ambitions towards any form of art can learn from their sure-handed hold on their audience.

On top of the puzzles, Portal features a computer voice which manipulates the player on several levels. Firstly, it issues explicit instructions to help train the player. Secondly, it drops apparently throw-away comments which, nevertheless, nudge the player in the correct direction. Thirdly, it makes transparent and naive attempts to manipulate the player's emotions, and lies outrageously to the player. A prime example is the now-famous cake which is often offered to the user as a reward for solving puzzles, but such a way as makes it obvious from the outset that there is no such cake. It still made me want to solve the puzzles! I knew it was manipulating me in this way, but it was so brilliantly and entertainingly done that I wanted it to keep manipulating me - this game made being explicitly manipulated into part of the path that it manipulated us along. I cannot begin to express my admiration for the game's designers for this tour de force of an audience experience. Portal is truly a work of art.

As the closing song (!) put it: This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: huge success.

Bletchley Park - a disappointment wrapped in Enigma.

We visited Bletchley Park yesterday. At the risk of diluting the purpose of this blog further than its already-homeopathic levels, here are a few thoughts.

My interest in BP, as they style themselves, was first piqued by the film Enigma, and from there to the book on which it was based (Robert Harris is now among my favourite authors). The Enigma code and its solution fascinated me, and its wider strategic context and influence equally so. I spent seven years at university studying maths of various kinds, and am a professional software engineer, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that I had invested time in understanding the rudiments of Enigma and the admirable cracking of it. I felt I was more clued-up than most BP visitors, but was hopeful of having some gaps in my understanding filled in.

Enigma is clearly BP's prime asset as an attraction. How then did they treat it? Pretty badly, to be frank. Little fragments of the story of its significance were dotted around the museum building almost at random, and mostly repeated each other. The main display pedestal for an original machine was empty. Little attempt was made to explain what it was and how the machine worked. About five separate places were the 'menus' for the 'bombes' (basically this is a script produced by a human cryptographer to feed to their proto-computers to crack that day's Enigma settings) explained. None of these explanations was, to my eye, comprehensible or interesting to an intelligent layman. I'm certain I didn't understand everything they were trying to say, and I was making a real effort - without wishing to sound arrogant, if I didn't, who would? We saw a reconstructed bombe, with only vague explanation as to how it actually helped to crack codes. Given the meagre summit of my education on which I now stand, this should have been an exhilarating view, but alas it was no more exciting than a big box with wires dangling out. I would dearly have loved to understand what this magnificent creation did, how, and why. Alas, I must rely on wikipedia.

On a broader level, BP is as much a museum to Enigma as it is to how museums were in the 1970s. Dated, dilapidated, disjointed, disorganised, disinteresting. I realise they are having funding problems, but that doesn't explain why what they already have is so carelessly and inadequately written. I've already mentioned repetition, but in one section we noticed two of their different printed text boards having exactly the same paragraphs of text, with different pictures. They were right next to each other. This is plainly sloppy and amateurish, however small the budget. There was a passage thrown at random about the war with Japan, with a very oblique reference to their having a nuclear weapons program, which was not expanded on or referred to at all. This would have been fascinating! In the middle of a floor about mostly cryptography and amateur radio listening stations (not a subject I understand in depth, or have any desire to), was a large collection of WW2 toys slapped in at random. After a while we gave up worrying whether we'd taken a wrong turn and missed the intended flow, because it was apparent that that was no such thing.

The museum shut promptly at 4pm, which we sadly weren't aware of, so we missed Hut 8. This is where the events in the film/book centre around - the battle of the Atlantic - and I was hoping they would give us some much-needed wider context, and most importantly a good story about Enigma. I doubt we'll bother to go back and fill in this gap. Our tour of the museum of computers was likewise curtailed. We saw the first genuine computer, with a total absence of explanation about how it worked, what it did, and what the lighted displays on it meant. I did enjoy their working BBC Micro - partly watching a 10-year old girl have no idea what to do with a command prompt, and partly by the nostalgia of entering the classic 10 PRINT "Karen smells "; 20 GOTO 10 program. Somehow I remembered that the semi-colon drops the carriage-return from the output - don't ask me why.

Credit where it is due, the BP story is an important one and deserves to be told. There is a lot of voluteerism happening there, and credit to them for giving up their time to this worthy cause. Any major building work would destroy the character of the war-time 'huts', and would be to its detriment. These comments on the museum should in no way detract from the awe and admiration I have for those who worked here during the war, and their unquestionably glorious achievements.

Despite my continued enthusiasm in the subject matter, on the whole my feelings are those of disappointment. To tie this back into my writing blog, my view that in any creation for an audience you must at once see the work from their point of view, and manipulate what you present to them so they go through the experience you want them to. Fail to do that and you are giving them what you want to give them instead of what you want them to have - and BP is proof of how big that gap is.