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.

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.

Red Dwarf - Back to Earth pts II & III

Well, it tied together two of the stronger story ideas which the series/books have ever generated, threw in a scene of genuine emotional clout, and ended on a hopeful note. What could possibly go wrong? Sadly, the whole was far less than the sum of its parts, and the blame lies squarely on some lamentable writing decisions.

I'm trying hard to make these posts a balanced and well-reasoned dissection of new episodes of a much-loved show. That said, the best thing I can honestly say about the return to Earth is that it now occupies pride of place in my Jar Jar Binks Archive of Things I Pretend Never Happened. A plot line in which characters interact with their audience and their creator is a potentially interesting one, but absolutely must never be used with already-established characters, lest the magic of those characters be irretrievably destroyed. The cast and crew speak proudly of their four-walled TV sets, but their writer systematically demolished the fourth wall by having his characters abruptly aware of their own fictional existence. Self-parody is joined by recursive self-reference, fanwank in-jokes, and cheap topical gags, and the result is jarring in the extreme. Even if this were a good idea, and I cannot emphasise enough that it wasn't, the execution is poor - the plot and the pacing grind to a standstill, and the use of characters is again weak. It isn't even funny.

The golden rule of writing is "Always be true to your characters". Have them behave realistically, and within their own personality. Rimmer commits a cold-blooded murder, and nobody even reacts to it. Lister, in the space of two minutes, is in fear of his imminent death, experiences his own death, kills his creator, and yet can laugh hysterically as he repeatedly hurts Rimmer's nadgers. This would only be remotely credible if Lister were a psychopath; he isn't, and it isn't. Sorry, this is crap writing. These aren't human beings, they are the playthings of the author. Ms Hologram, having served her purpose, is unceremoniously dumped into the Darth Maul Dustbin of Undeveloped Utility Characters. She could have done so much more.

The dystopian Blade Runner angle worked really well, once you accepted the abrupt jump there from Coronation Street, and that we were previously in "real life" (no huge monoliths in Westminster last time I checked). It looked brilliant. So much more could have been done with this idea - I wish the entire Earth episode had been set there. At it was, it was an incongruous fantasy rampage shoehorned into, and with no connection to, what had been done previously. An opportunity wasted.

The scene in which the crew are in Carbug (fabulous prop, but better off in a Top Gear stunt) and "land" it as though a spaceship was witty, original, and funny. A moment's thought, however, and we notice Lister's comment about his hometown having lots of stolen cars, and Rimmer being a classic car expert (previous episode) - it's a pedantic point, but surely this undermines their necessary unfamiliarity? A more careful author would have cut out these in favour of keeping the (worthy) landing scene, to no other cost to the script.

Having endured the embarrassing tour of modern-day Britain, we are rewarded with a noticeable recovery in the end section. Lister is faced with the decision to leave his personal utopia (rework of the book version of Better Than Life) knowing that it is a fantasy. This is a really strong idea. Craig Charles shows us how much he has developed as an actor, and delivers a scene of genuine poignancy. Bravo. The Earth plot is then tied up as a fantasy (explicit Back To Reality rework) - OK, so it's a bit holey in that the others weren't experiencing their own utopia (in BTR they were all respectively in plausible hells), but we can forgive that. We have the clunkily-set-up but otherwise strong idea of Lister chasing Kochanski in hope of a reunion, leading us forward into another (?) series. Hope for them, hope for us.

Watching the Making Of episode was a revelation. There are some seriously clever technical things going on behind the scenes, and credit is due for them. The production, on the whole, was very impressive, particularly given the practical constraints they must have. There were several good ideas in the writing which deserved much more than they got; there were a few very bad ideas which got far more than they deserved. There is some genuine merit in the writing - let this not be lost sight of - but it was too clouded by its rank failings for the result to be a success, and the overall sense is one of opportunities missed. Red Dwarf has never been perfect, but in its pomp the shortcomings were papered over by the sheer joy of its inventivess, wit, and panache. Not so here.

I hope there is a further series, and I hope that it is an outstanding success. I cannot, however, look forward to it. Forgive the repetition (this is a writing blog after all!), but I hope it's better-written than Back To Earth. I can only wonder what Rob Grant (those in the know will understand the schism far better than I ever will) thinks of what his co-creation has become in his absence. Were it me, I would be upset.

Red Dwarf - Back to Earth pt I

New Red Dwarf. Finally a chance to give closure to the story, and a happily-ever-after for these beloved characters. A chance to atone for the weak and puerile Series VIII and finish on a high. I have greatly looked forward to this!

Having been a somewhat obsessive fan as a teenager, I grew out of it and hadn't (re-)watched an episode for about ten years until I saw a few recently. Happily, they stood up to the ravages of time, and more pertinently to the mature judgement of adulthood, and of an aspiring writer. Funny, sharp, inventive, showing a great rapport between the actors. Fully deserving of its exalted place in the sit-com pantheon. This was a happy nostalgia trip indeed.

There are two more new episodes to come, tonight and tomorrow, and I really want to like them. I really wanted to like last night's episode too, and I tried hard to view it with realistic expectations. Alas, it fell short even of these.

We weren't given an explanation of how the proir cliffhanger was resolved, why the crew have disappeared, where Kochanski is, or where Holly is. It's like a reset button was pressed and Series VIII didn't happen. Fine by me! No time wasted digging our way out of old holes. The "Nine Years Previously" caption (or whatever it was) hasn't yet been tied up - a whole episode of flashback? I'm sure all this will become clear soon, but why put the caption there at all? It seems a jarring loose end.

The opening scene of dialogue between Lister and Rimmer is a strong one, and a welcome reminder of the tenor of the early series. Sneeze-ironing made me laugh aloud - a promising start indeed. Rimmer, however, quickly became annoying, and acted throughout without realistic motivations - no longer a believable (if objectionable!) character - and he dangled dangerously above the tentacled monster of self-parody.

The plot felt like it was all happening purely to give them a magic bullet to return to Earth. The leviathan (opening scenes of Back to Reality with much less panache?) appeared out of nowhere, did nothing, and then vanished again. There was no narrative tension. Ms Hologram appeared out of nowhere, had a mishandled interaction with Rimmer and an cringingly unoriginal one-character-doesn't-know-another-one-is-listening scene, and hands them the magic bullet (surprised nobody tried to sleep with her - or is this still to come?). I don't mind necessary plot elements being introduced, but they need to stand up on their own - the strings were all too visible. The show depends on our seeing things through Lister's eyes, coloured by his surprisingly-perceptive and human take on events, but he vanished from the script the moment Ms arrives. Lonliness and the hope of a return to Earth have surely been the definitive underlying tensions of Red Dwarf ever since its inception - why do we not see this in Lister now the hopes look like being realised? His reaction is absolutely pivotal! Why do we not see the social impact of a new crew-member into a hugely insular group (this was handled better in Series VII with KK's arrival)? Maybe we will tonight, but even for the first part it was a golden opportunity missed.

Much of the show has a CGI background, and it isn't seamless. I've never liked CGI skutters, and the wrestle-with-tentacles scene was poor. Shoestring special effects are part of - and almost define - Red Dwarf, but shoestring CGI seems almost dishonest. Cunning model shots feel more real, provoke a far more sympathetic response, and have a certain charm which using computers utterly lacks. The Star Wars prequels suffered badly from this too, and their budget was rather larger! Given how the show was financed, this is all forgiveable, but it makes the suspension of disbelief that bit harder.

I know nothing of the practical constraints they may have had, but not filming in front of a live audience was a mistake (though I'm glad they omitted a taped laughter track). The performance as a whole lacked its once-effortless vibrance, and the characters didn't gel together as a 'posse' like they once did - there was no sense of a group of people who were very familiar with each other and had been through so much together. This, sadly, was once a central pillar of the show's deserved success, subtle and intangible though it may be. I can imagine it being very difficult resurrecting a twenty-year-old format and immediately recapturing the old magic, but the dynamic just isn't there. Would a studio audience have helped the actors?

Red Dwarf has never had bullet-proof writing, but the earlier work stood up far better than this. Almost anything can be forgiven if the result is funny, but the aforesaid laugh-out-loud was the only one so far, and this brings the other shortcomings of the scripts into sharper relief.

I've greatly enjoyed reading Robert Llewellyn's twitter feed during the production, and it seems that I am in a minority of those disappointed with the show. I sincerely hope that it is an outstanding critical and financial success, and wish all involved nothing but the best. Given my own total anonymity there is little chance of any of them, or indeed anybody at all, reading these thoughts, which is probably for the best. I also sincerely hope that the next two episodes are an improvement upon this one - I would very much like the Red Dwarf journey to end in a happy place.

This is a writing exercise: take something which I love to bits, and figure out why its good stuff is better than its less good stuff. I still have a lot to learn as a writer, and learning from others' mistakes is as important as learning from their triumphs.