Suited and Rebooted

Perhaps someone can explain to me the point of an Alex Rider adaption in which 12 minutes into the first episode a character says of the eponymous child hero “He’s not a kid anymore.” I mean, hellooooo? He’s supposed to be a pint-sized James Bond - a purer, more fun version of Britain’s finest secret agent, with an additional dose of whimsical wish-fulfilment and a certain slightly subversive worm’s eye view on the world of international covert operations. Why have a kid Bond who's not a kid?

So the big problem with Amazon's latest Alex Rider reboot is simply that Alex is too... big. To be fair, Alex Pettyfer was too old back in the 2000s movie version. But Otto Farrant, although winning in so many other ways, is literally in his early 20s. As it happens, apart from that Farrant's version of Alex is generally speaking an improvement on Pettyfer's. His new Alex is clever and fun and likeable, and he has a certain based humanity that Pettyfer's lacked. Jack is important to him, even when he's "under cover", and he has a low opinion of "hippy bullshit". And in fact it's only every now and again that he slightly overdoes the gawky teenager schtick - wearing the sleeves of his Point Blanc yellow uniform tunic halfway over his hands, for example, or blundering about in a too noticeably oafish teenage manner even when supposedly on a paramilitary operation. The story too from time to time seems overtly at pains to make the point that he's s child, to such an extent that by the end of Episode 7 he's started to feel a lot like a passive hero - a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style glorified hanger-on in his own franchise. Of course that's pretty much par for the course in the age of woke heroism. (There are a couple of times when I wondered is this new Alex Rider's uncle had even taught him to fight.) But it also severely undermines the wish-fulfilment element of the whole premise.

Having said that, one of the franchise's "structural jokes" holds up surprisingly well. Alex thinks his uncle is boring even though he’s really James Bond, and it works on various levels. Obviously everyone is supposed to think that spies are boring anyway, no matter how dangerous and unpleasant their real work is. And of course, albeit on a slightly meta level, if Alex is supposed to have the makings of a super-spy it is mildly improbably that he never worked out for himself what his closest male relative did for a living. At the same time though children tend to think their older family members are boring just because. So if James Bond had had a family, what would they have thought of him? (No man is a hero to a valet. And when Mark Twain was a teenager he thought his father was the stupidest man in the world. And so on. My parents were both doctors, and for virtually the whole of my childhood I didn’t really know what that really meant. It's hard to imagine one's parents ever doing anything particularly interesting or important, and no matter how cool other kids think your dad is to you he's just... your dad. Such, I suppose, is the price one pays for telling the kid it's time for bed, or for not answering questions about sex.) 

When it stops being a joke, of course, we're supposed to find it tragic and moving that Alex Rider doesn't think his uncle's job was cool and doesn't want to follow in his footsteps. And on one level we can sympathise. Alex blames MI6 for is uncle's death, and sooner or later we're going to find out that he was quite right to do so. And of course it's worth bearing in mind that even the sorts of things that James Bond finds enjoyable (drinking and gambling, at least - let’s not mention the other thing) can be tedious to a teen who just wants to hang out with his mates. But it's also admittedly a bit of a stumbling block for the whole Alex Rider concept! He’s a fantasy character made to appeal to children, so why exactly doesn’t he enjoy doing what he does - in the same way, it has to be said, that Bond does (or at least Sean, George, Roger and Pierce’s versions of him did)? We can certainly imagine most teenagers in real life wold want to call it quits after one or two frightening and painful escapades. But at least since the time of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (not to mention Hergé's Tintin) most children, teens and adults have enjoyed fantasizing about having thrilling covert adventures. A young-but-not-that-young Bond, who Harry Potter-style has Bond-like powers from an early age without even speculating why, and who then turns out not actually to want to go to Hogwarts, just isn't quite so appealing as a character.

So what in fact does a likeable but slightly dull twenty-something version of Alex Rider bring to the spy-game table? The original Alex was supposed to be unobtrusive enough to masquerade as a child in a fake family (the plausibility factor) and un-threatening enough for his opponents to underestimate him (hence the wish-fulfilment!), not to mention small enough to fit up chimneys and down ventilator shafts (subverting and deconstructing the genre!). But what is the USP - either to children or, as an intellectual challenge, to a writer - of an Alex Rider who is quite literally old enough to do all the things James Bond can do, including smoke and drive, and who doesn't even want to do any of them? In the first episode he drinks an alcoholic cocktail - albeit a disgusting teenager one, which he doesn't particularly enjoy - and beats a man's face into a bloody pulp with his bare hands. I mean, OK. But so what? He's like Bond, only slightly more annoying and nerdy? Well it's a perfectly legitimate take on the genre, given that Fleming himself saw Bond as less of a hero and more of a morally compromised geek who just happened to be good at what he did. But is it really interesting? And is it even really Alex Rider?

“Well, you can’t imagine Bond following super-villains on Facebook, can you?” I mean, really? I’m in my 40s and my parents use Facebook more than I do. What exactly does Horowitz (currently approaching retirement age) even think he knows about modern teenagers? (Do modern English teens use American terms like "grounded"? Do they still say "lame"? Do they panic when they lose their mobile 'phones? I mean quite honestly I don't know. But does Horowitz know more about them than I do? Alex and his friend are clearly supposed to be uber-retro (into Kurosawa, going double dating like in the 1950s, etc.), but even so... And how exactly is a teenager in the modern world of social media supposed to go incognito anyway? Indeed, why choose to set Alex Rider in the “real” world at all? Why not just kick off in some crazy fantasy spy school (some place like Rugby College, for example) and then take it from there, just making Alex the best of them, with his own dark and tragic secret, and then launch him into some fun screwed-up kid-Bond scenario?

In fact why the need even to give Alex Rider an origin story? Even the Daniel Craig Bond didn't (quite!) go that far. Whatever else you might think of Agent Cody Banks, at least they called that one right. So just kick off with Alex on a mission with a couple of adults. The adults screw up. Alex chases the baddy with desperate speed and ferocity. Adults poring over monitors yelling abort. Others saying who is this kid? Alex recovers the MacGuffin but the baddy escapes. The adults are all stunned by how good he is. Climax with hero shot, voice oov says "That's Alex Rider!" - and cut to Bond-esque opening credits. Main story opens with Alex being Bondishly arrogant and insubordinate to his (adult) superiors but also sweetly charming. Interestingly you’d actually have to have a bit more realism than you’d expect from Bond. (The adults would have to care about Alex in a way that M seldom does about Bond, and Alex would have to have a certain amount of vulnerability, which of course Bond tends not to have. But that’s a minor gripe.) And it could definitely be fun. After all, there are plenty of things a child secret agent could do that would be genuinely interesting. Why not have him infiltrate an inner-city child gang, or a slave racket? Why not a cult, or an army of child soldiers? Alex Rider chasing drugs mules and underage prostitutes could be genuinely gripping. Or just have him being a kid investigator nonchalantly picking up on clues that adults drop when their guard is down, and only occasionally going full Jupiter Jones or Hardy Boys.

There are times indeed when one starts to wonder whether the writers are actually trying to subvert expectations. Alex Rider being the shy late arrival at a teen house party? It's just not him. Actually Alex Rider being another lad's wing-man is just as bad. (In the books Bond was actually much more matey with his male colleagues than the unpleasantly and obsessively hetero-social character in the movies - he genuinely enjoys drinks at the club, a round of golf with Bill Tanner, etc. But he's still an alpha male and never just another man's support staff.) And we see that he's good at climbing drainpipes and opening locked drawers. So what about his other powers? It would be nice if he could turn up at a party and immediately recognise everyone there. More importantly, he needs to have a stiff upper lip when he hears about the death of his uncle. Alex blubbing just is problematic, and although over all Farrant does a competent job, it takes a long time to warm to the boy. He doesn’t have Alex Pettyfer’s chiselled good looks, nor indeed Daniel Radcliffe’s blinking prepubescent winsomeness. Come to that, he doesn’t have Nicholas Rowe’s vowel sounds or Tom Holland’s impressive physical assets. Soft brown eyes, a pudgy round friendly face, and the dorkiest hairdo this side of the last ten years (with a bad blond dye-job to boot). And he cycles. With a cycle-helmet. (And for all that this is supposedly a grittier, more realistic version of Alex Rider, it has a seriously fantastical fantasy version of London. Is this based on real life - or at least on the lives of the sorts of teenage boys who read books - or is it based on Hollyoaks?)

The death of Alex's uncle on the other hand is more realistic than the ludicrous scene in the film version with Damien Lewis hanging upside down from a helicopter. But it's also surprisingly grim for a series that is fundamentally still for children. And it does upset the genuine subversion of the opening line of the book of Stormbreaker. Fourteen years ago they were aping the vibe and conventions of the Brosnan films, mere months before Casino Royale would sweep them all comprehensively away. Now they seem to be out-Craiging Craig, and the contrast between Rider Sr's death and the silly slapstick death of the baddies' first victim in the opening pre-credits scene is jarring. MI6 meanwhile is located in a multi-storey car-park. (Echoes of the warehouse chic of 2011's pretentious but substandard version of Tinker, Tailor?) It's worth remembering that there's a difference between being gritty and morally complex and being actually realistic. In Episode 7, for example, MI6 start almost randomly murdering people on the testimony of a teenage boy. (I mean, WTF? And Horowitz self-identifies as a "liberal" - although he also writes for The Spectator. Natch!) In the end of course, although they're happy to murder the baddies' guards, they don't (so far as we can tell!) murder the clones. But then we don't find out what happens to them either.

The baddies for their part initially show a good deal of promise. Point Blanc itself has a surprisingly cool creepy Overlook Hotel vibe to it (with maybe a touch of Agatha Christie) - which is (presumably!) clever, given that it is (apparently!) deliberate. Is the main baddie a Malthusian? It's one of the oldest Bond villain tropes in the manual - going back to Stromberg and Drax (not to mention Richmond Valentine in Kingsman). Alex (finally, albeit briefly!) gets his shirt off - for a medical examination. And the episode closes on a Prisoner-esque brainwashing montage! And there's an implicit promise that over the next few episodes we're going to see something clever and "psychological".† So suffice it to say that the eventual cliched rubbish about Nazis and human cloning is a big, big let-down. Even the dramatic double double bluff with the Alex clone in the last episode - with the dangled possibility that the real Alex was left behind at Point Blanc and the duffers at British intelligence have inadvertently rescued his clone - doesn't last very long, with the clone giving himself away almost straightaway when he bludgeons a Swiss motorist to death. (It's classic movie nasty Naziness, apparently!)

In fact it's in the final episode that the whole thing genuinely starts to fall apart. The theme song for one thing is still terrible. (The lyrics are one of the few things that aren't a patch on the 2000s version, despite being tediously ear-wormy.) And by the end the writer has given up even trying to make any of it make any sense. How did the clone find Alex's address, for example? In any other genre it wouldn't really matter, but this is a spy series, where ultra-clever operatives follow clues and dropped titbits, so even "in genre" we ought to have the right to know. And Alex keeps a spare school uniform at home. (Really? I'm quite sure I've never met anyone who did that.††) Still, on we plod! The arrival of the clone at the school is very Terminator. (They reprise the same vibe in the disco scene. "I'll be back!" Yeah, cheers love, but we get it. As with the Overlook Hotel atmosphere of the middle episodes, one presumes that directors know what they're doing when they do things like this. In fact even the car park stuff is reminiscent of the sort of thing we used to see in an earlier era.) And are we even supposed to know which Alex is the clone and which is the real one? And if so how? (To be honest, it would be more interesting if the real Alex was a bit of a dick, but we know that's not going to happen even in a "modern" and "edgy" teens' TV series - even on the Internet.) We then go on to discover that Yassen Gregorovich is far more bad-ass in this version of Alex Rider than he was either in the books or when he was played by Damien Lewis. Mrs Jones brandishing a takeaway coffee at the end just put me in mind of Aidan Gallagher - seven years younger than Otto Farrant and umpteen times cooler! (Alas, even in post-Potter 2020, British telly (even online telly!) still can't bring itself to cast minors in even semi-adult dramas.) And to round off, of course, we have "The book was better." (Post-modern? Moi?)

So, what did everyone else think? The Grauniad reckoned it was "escapist". (Subtlety and cultural complexity aren't exactly their strong suits.) NME were correct that the series didn't (even!) identify its target audience.††† (To be fair, that may go for a lot of Amazon's original output. Who else watched Man in the High Castle? Or the new Tales from the Loop series, for that matter?) And The Indy thought the series caught the books' "momentum" - which is a little bit perverse, given that I could have read Point Blanc several times in the time the series took to tell its version.

And finally, of course, how does the new version of Alex compare with the old one?

Well, personally I was never entirely sold on Alex Pettyfer, who once again was himself much too old to play Alex Rider (when he eventually did, that is - Horowitz tells the story of how he spotted his perfect Alex whilst watching a TV-version of his own alma mater's literary finest hour). Alex Rider with the nervous energy of a twelve-year-old Christian Bale would have been electrifying. Alex Rider as a languid teenager was less so. But Alex Rider as a twenty-something pretending to be a languid teenager just felt slightly... deadening. There's nothing really wrong with Otto Farrant's take on the character. But he is too darn old.

Interestingly I didn't even notice the almost total lack of gadgets in the Amazon version. Yes, I know this is Craig-ification. But clearly I didn't miss them. The gadgets were always the most child-friendly element of the Bond films anyway, and it's slightly gauche of a an actual children's author to rely on them too much. Yes, I know Roald Dahl had them. But if you look back on his Bond work it's surprising how few even he actually used. (Who needs pen guns or magnetic watches when you've got spaceships and ninja?)

So what are the other pros and cons of the earlier version? Well Alex Pettyfer did at least look like Alex Rider, albeit too old and quite obviously the wrong side of a teenage growth-spurt. (And his eyes were the wrong colour, but then so were Daniel Radcliffe's.) But on re-watching one notices Ewan McGregor albeit briefly injects a surprising amount of warmth and humanity into Ian and Alex's man-boy relationship - something painfully lacking in the new version. Horowitz's gimmicks - the BMW in the car-crusher (in a nod to Goldfinger) - may have seemed fun to him at the time. But plot-wise they're pointless, and on re-watching they seem gimmicky without being fun. The fetishization of modern London is a peculiarity that both versions share, and one wonders why. The beginning of The World is Not Enough was actually quite a good in-joke for long-term Bond fans. (And let's face it, every red-blooded Englishman is, deep down, a Bond fan.) Back in the late 1970s and early1980s we saw Bond cause chaos all over Europe (Venice in Moonraker, Germany in Octopussy, Paris in A View to a Kill, etc.). So bringing the carnage home to dear old London Town was genuinely fun. But transmogrifying Bond into a teen riding a bike (with or without a helmet) over Albert Bridge or past the Shard really is just... lame.

Back in the 2000s version, Bill Nighy as the M character clearly thought he was doing a straight-up Bond spoof - and to be fair Bond spoofs have been done plenty of times before and since. To this day though I'm still not entirely sure what the point of them actually is, Bond himself so often having been a send-up of himself. (You may as well try to satirise Donald Trump.) So for example Nighy apparently decided to make Blunt gay. (And if he's not, why does he have the statue of a man's nude torso in his office?) It's a bit of a bum note by anyone standards, given that even Dumbledore didn't officially come out until after the first series of the Warner Bros films was finished. So needless to say his more down-to-earth equivalent in the new version is a vast improvement. In fact generally, the darker, more cynical tone of the new version - not to mention its quite on-the-nose observations about the nature of an over-mighty and unaccountable state bureaucracy, complete with intrusive immigration and child protection services - is far more rewarding than the smug jokiness of Nighy and Stephen Fry in 2006.

The Indy's woke snigger about the cast now being more "diverse" was on reflection especially ill-judged. Mrs Jones is now white (again), whereas in the film she was black. But to be honest I can't say it's much of an improvement. Sophie Okonedo played her as a one-dimensional callous bitch, and frankly that was all that was required. Conversely, in the new version Alex has two black females thrust in his direction, but the only girl he shows any serious interest in is the surprisingly attractive white girl who wasn't even in the books.

One does slightly despair of the Army's replacement of the Navy in British popular culture's representation of the Armed Forces. And the fact that Alex is very clearly not a little kid is particularly painful in the scenes in the Pettyfer version where he's dropped in with real soldiers. (He's actually taller than Wolf. Was everyone just too polite to mention it?) Indeed there are plenty of 16-year-old heroes in basic training in real life and no one (except perhaps the buffoons of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch) thinks anything of it. And, er, why is he doing basic training in a Special Forces camp anyway? And, er, why is he doing basic training anyway, when it's already been established that his uncle trained him to within an inch of his life? How is running around in DPMs with a rifle and doing the sort of assault course that kids in the CCF do for fun (Think about it...!) going to help him be a secret agent? One is left with the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that the writer and director simply needed a 1980s-style "training montage" to cover the dramatic caesura between Alex Rider the slouching schoolboy and Alex Rider the hardened superspy. So happily all this nonsense is missing from the new version (even if it is nice to reflect that in 2020 blacking up have would be seen as "problematic").

On the cod training front, now that one comes to think of it, Dap is similarly painful in Ender's Game - the subtle, complicated pedagogue of the book reduced on film to the most toe-curling cliché of a drill sergeant, and wince-inducingly realised at that. And in truth what the film version of Stormbreaker has in common with that of Ender's Game is that they're both similarly well-meaning and surprisingly honest attempts to adapt their source material: they just fail, albeit for different reasons. Ender simply found it impossible to translate a moral that Hollywood wasn't ready to hear into a modern kidult sci-fi movie. (Also, the problem of making a big-screen roman a clef about a child soldier in space between the ages of 6 and 12 was never going to be one any director was ever going to be seriously interested in solving.) But with Stormbreaker one just got the feeling that no one really thought ahead. Horowitz knows how to make great British telly. Why exactly did he trip over his own feet making the leap to tinsel-town? (It must be said though that thanks to a comparative lack of time constraints there is actually space for subtlety and depth on the telly that there simply isn't on the big screen.)

For what it's worth, my own feeling is that wish fulfilment simply works better in children's heads than it does on the big screen or on the small. Bond only works because adults when they watch him are normally sufficiently well lubricated to enjoy him. And even Bond in any "real-life" military context is problematic. It's taken for granted that the 00 agents are better than than the SAS (who are in turn better than the Paras, etc.). So the military themselves can only ever form the background to Bond (as they do, for example, at the beginning of The Living Daylights). He can pop on his old uniform from time to time for nostalgia purposes, but he cannot really be on active duty with them.

The biggest problem with the film of Stormbreaker once again is that it genuinely didn't know whether it was supposed to be funny or not. In fact the problem with tone is THE problem par excellence. The books were supposed to be a straightforward children's James Bond, with the added bonus that an adult would get the knowing deconstructionist angle. The film, unfortunately, is just another knock-off spoof (like Teen Agent and Spy Kids and Cody Banks - and, for that matter, Young Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood Jr, etc. etc.) of a film series that (at the time!) was increasingly becoming a spoof of itself. And let's face it, a spoof has to be clever not to make the average viewer not want simply to turn off and watch the original. Again, thankfully, that's a problem that the new version has dealt with quite definitively. 

There is of course a fundamental problem with Bond himself as a character. Basically he's just a nerd who's good at what he does: he's fit, he's clever, he's competent. In every other respect, he's barely a hero at all: he drinks like a chimney, he smokes like a fish, and he bangs like a shithouse door. He also lies and murders for Queen and country. In order even to root for him as a character, implicitly we have to enter the morally ambiguous world that he inhabits. He's not someone you'd take home to meet your parents. He's not someone you'd expect to see in Heaven.

Horowitz for his part factors all this in, but in taking care of Alex's morals he also (once again!) makes Alex less fun: what's the point of indulging juvenile fantasies if at the same time you're implicitly wagging your finger at them? More to the point, how exactly is the average juvenile reader supposed to sympathise with Alex Rider when he spends all his time chafing at authority and kvetching about all the exciting adventures he's forced to have? (Would J K Rowling's stories really have worked if Harry Potter hadn't wanted to be a wizard?)

I suppose it remains to be seen how Horowitz eventually finishes his series and how he completes Alex's character arc. It's quite hard meanwhile to imagine how much longer Amazon can carry on making a surprisingly watchable TV-version of said series with a lanky adult playing a child in the lead role. But then there is also time for them to iron out a certain amount of early episode weirdness and continue, at least for a couple of years, with a series that so far has shown a good deal of genuine promise.

*One actually wonders if JKR's secret entrances for the Ministry of Magic were really inspired by the film version's highly questionable photobooth entrance to MI6 in Liverpool Street Station. (The film of Stormbreaker - complete with Alex's slightly out-of-order "Hogwarts" snark, which made it into the trailers though not the final cut - came out at about the same time as Rowling was writing Deathly Hallows.)

†Teenagers are "rebels" who hate their parent, school teachers, legitimate authority, etc. And so are Bond villains. So is that how they get "turned"? (It's a familiar moral to anyone who's read up on how the Nazis "seduced" young men in the Hitler Youth. But it's also bollocks. In real life teenagers just want their parents' approval, and only become frustrated when it's not forthcoming, when they feel confused and frustrated about others' expectations of them, etc. - and of course at the intrinsic and extrinsic physical limitations of their current states in life. They aren't per se anti-authoritarian, rather than simply expanding their ego boundaries.) But are they going to turn him not against his undercover parents but against the service itself?

††As it happens, the decision to go with school uniform (and a "realistic" London academy-style comp) was definitely the right way to go - vs. the cool fantasy (Sex Education-esque - because this is Amazon, so suck on it, Netflix!) American-style school in the Pettifer film. The only slight problem of course is that it feels as if it's compensating for the fact that all the series "child" actors are basically adults. And whereas once again one despairs of a kid-version of James Bond having "romantic" interests (becuase, once again, what's the point?), Kyra is actually an "interesting" person, and whereas in the books Alex is fourteen, here he's twenty-three. So can we expect kissing in future seasons? I hope not, but then this is the 2020s.

†††In fact towards the end I very much started wondering just who else was actually watching this? Were American and Korean teenage girls swooning over Alex's bangs? Were shitty London neo-corporatist "academy" schools going to be the new Hogwarts? Were beanie hats going to be retro nerd Bond-spoof sidekick cool? (Again?)

Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020

The British Establishment and the Media

Can anyone else remember those heady, halcyon, pre-Covid days from, oh, about nine months ago, when righteous liberals were challenging the British MSM to be sceptical about Boris Johnson? (It really wasn't so long ago...)

Things like Channel 4's eating humble pie after one of their classic blunders (if you can really call it a blunder to accuse the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of "racism") during last year's general election ought to have come with a sense of relief. For any of  the mainstream media (MSM) to repent of any of their screw-ups is unusual, after all. But at the time it felt a lot like a strategy of diversion and even (pace the current epidemiological situation) inoculation - apologising for a comparatively minor error in order to distract from a far, far larger one.

And so lo, before our very eyes the old symbiosis of the MSM and government was re-established. The two faces of the Establishment’s PR machine - its party politicians and its corporate journalists - duly kissed and made up.

Nick Cohen and Huw Edwards did their best to get a battle going on between Boris and the BBC - both readily supporting the latter - because supporting an undemocratic media corporation against a democratically elected government is, of course, democratic! (Cohen in particular might like to look up the word ‘democratic’ in a dictionary some time. Only people like him equate it with permanent rule in favour of a state’s “institutions” and their vested interests -and no normal person thinks the BBC or the civil service are impartial. In fact getting the latter to implement the manifesto commitments of a legitimately elected executive is a pretty good definition of what democracy ought to be. Of the people, by the people, for the people... and all that guff! But there’s no telling some people.)

Looking back on this supposed feud between Boris and the Beeb from just over nine months later unfortunately it's surprising how misguided it feels, not to mention how quickly it fizzled out. Most of this at the time, for example, just came across as paranoid partisan sniping, with little genuine sense of a big intellectual or institutional split.* As it happens, he was of course quite right not to trust Boris Johnson. And keeping an eye on Boris’s manipulations of the media would definitely have been a Good Idea. It just never actually happened. The MSM swallowed all of Boris's claims about Covid, including the claims that contradicted the other claims, and asked for seconds.

I would suggest though that since 2016 something has gone quite badly wrong with the mainstream media generally! After all, 'according to Ofcom 49 per cent of Britons now get their news from social media, a proportion that has risen from 18 per cent in just four years.' [The Spectator] Their undisguised and undiluted hatred of Brexit and Trump, for example, has made them utterly incapable of reporting on current affairs in either Britain or America (and probably Russia, if you think about it) with anything even approaching fairness or balance. And lo and behold, half the population have given up on them completely!

Not that things are that much better across the herring pond. The ever redoubtable Douglas Murray recently blew the gaffe on Bill Maher.

Most people have mixed feelings about Bill Maher — they like him when he agrees with them and dislike him when he doesn’t. Perhaps I should note that throughout his career I’ve always admired him. But there’s a problem with his show: the unnaturally close relationship between him and studio-audience. When Maher says something vaguely funny, the audience whoops and hollers. When a guest he disapproves of says something funny or wise that he doesn’t agree with, the guest is met with stony silence. It is made to seem as though it is very hard to get one over on Bill Maher. 

It was only when someone who had been in the audience explained to me the warm-up procedures for the show and the fact that the audience is actually directed when to laugh, clap and applaud, that you realise how much power Maher has (far more than almost any other host) to be the one who decides which guests do well, and which points fly.

Every day’s a school day, I suppose. (Why is it always the creepiest and most feckless of libertarians - Emperor Boris included! - who wants to be Ming the Merciless?)

The "independent" media, alas, are not noticeably better. To this day it’s not entirely clear to me whose side the “investigative journalists” of Exaro were really on (let alone what they were on, given how whacky some of what they were coming out with was). Yes, their links to the British “mainstream” Left are a matter of public record. And their “anti-Establishment” credentials ended up being somewhat tarnished not just because the smears they were peddling were spurious (and morally appalling) but also because they were directed not against the Establishment per se so much as against various individual members of the Tory Party. In fact their putative founder Jerome Booth (Christ Church, Oxford and Anglia Ruskin, something big in emerging markets doncha know, etc.) is rather more “Establishment” than they might let on.

Perhaps the simple truth though is really just that everyone likes a good conspiracy theory, and if it involves sex then most people will like it even more. For some reason everyone but everyone likes either (a) reading about sex, or (b) looking down from a moral high horse on anyone whose sexual tastes are slightly more, er, exotic than his own, or (c) both. Though it may have a had a distinctly left-ish hue to it, at the end of the day the “Westminster paedophile” allegations scandal was really just a product of bigotry and titillation and not very much more.

The Establishment's very own little beagle on the other hand is of course a decidedly strange outfit called Bellingcat. (See here.) And they're strangely convincing. Even the good old Speccie has fallen prey to their enthusiastic tail-wagging.

Julian Assange’s Wikileaks was once fêted by western media for its willingness to release suppressed information — for instance, footage of US choppers shooting up unarmed civilians in Iraq — but later turned into a channel for political dirt stolen by Kremlin-sponsored Russian hackers.

Except that (pace Mandy Rice-Davies) they say they didn’t. What probably happened in fact was simply that Assange’s team fell from grace with the Left partly because of his own sexual peccadilloes (in Sweden a famous leaker can be undone by, er, a leaky condom, it turns out) but mostly because they simply went too far. Assuming that Hillary would win anyway (because Trump wouldn’t “be allowed to win”), they thought they’d bolster their credentials with the Far Left (or should that be Far Far Left?) by coming out swinging for Bernie Sanders. These are, after all, the same people who were quite happy to force the West’s allies in Afghanistan to choose between exile from their country or possible murder by the Taliban (because they were “informants” and “they had it coming”). For them the actual election of Donald Trump was presumably just one of those things.

And finally, if you really do want to go all the way, there's dear old Pooty Poot and what's left of the pro-Russian Far Left. So was Peter Hitchens supping with the Devil again when he was recently endorsed by the Canary? One would counsel him to use a long spoon, in any case.†

*And if Cohen was merely his usual obnoxious leftist self, this from Edwards was dubious in the extreme.

And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.

Surely the point of attacking perceived bias is to correct that bias in favour of truth - or at least of fairness and balance? Here and there, of course, one did come across small victories. At least, for example, the BBC stopped insisting: (i) that an Albanian gangster murdered in London was Swedish; and (ii) that there was any very great mystery about why he was assassinated. But they were only ever few and far between.

†For what it’s worth (and I write as one who is normally deeply sceptical of the anti-Russian fantasies of the MSM) my instinct is that here be Russian disinformation rather than that Hitchens of all people stumbled upon a massive conspiracy - by the Americans, presumably! - to fabricate reasons for a war against Syria that, thanks to Trump, never actually happened. But perhaps we’ll see!

The Bores

Well it had its moments, but really it failed to live up to any of the promise of the first season. Whereas Season 1 of The Boys finished with shock revelations, complex characters and a decisive break from the source material, Season 2 rowed back on all three.

The biggest disappointment was of course Homelander, who by the end had more or less been reset to the "stupid Superman" character he is in the comics. All the hints of depth that he had in the first season are now gone. He doesn't say prayers before bed with his kid, for example, so presumably we're to take it as read that his Christianity in the first season was simple hypocrisy, rather than something that might have made him an "interesting" person. And although he can still be sneaky and manipulative from time to time, for the most part he's basically so dumb he's hardly even frightening anymore.

Every now and again, for example, both he and other characters seemed to be forget what his powers actually were. Why doesn't he hear Ashley Barrett approaching the door of Stilwell's old office, for example, before she interrupts his "moment". (Did he drop the bottle? Why not just screw it up into a tiny ball? Was he too engrossed in said moment? Is he starting to lose it? That would a surprisingly human direction to take a psychopath former lab experiment, but otherwise it's just a strangely sloppy moment in an otherwise remarkably genre aware franchise.) Ditto in episode 2! Why does he need to go through his ex's drawers when he could just, er, x-ray them? And by episode 3 he can stand in the same room as someone having a 'phone conversation and pretend not to overhear it - although of course in the next episode we discover that he did overhear it. (Why did Maeve imagine that he hadn't? Is she genuinely not so bright as we thought?)

More painfully, it's no longer clear that there's much more to the show's "politics" than simple, unrelenting, grinding (post-Trump!) wokeism. The show does still have its moments, but they're sketchy and less frequent than they used to be. Is there a socio-political comment behind Ryan's home-schooling, for example? Possibly - but it could just as easily be that home-schoolers can't manage to hold out against the "real" world for long. The idea of superheroes' being not "born" but "made" is a direct rewriting of the palaeo-leftist X-Men mythology. And the cut to a therapy session with the Deep is a direct call-back to the whole "being a mutant (or a kid wizard, for that matter) is like being a gay" meme. (Hero or monster? Beautiful angelic higher-functioning sociopath or neurotic little pervert? You decide!) But it's little more than a joke that is funny for a moment and then goes nowhere. The whole 'Girls get it done' subplot meanwhile is a glorious satire on Hollywood's prurient intersectional approach to homosexuality, but it never goes much further than a basically clunky leftist message that celebrities should be entitled to their "private lives".* And the worst "racist" in the series is of course Butcher, who apparently blames all supes for the sins of a minority of them. But we're supposed to imagine that by the last episode he's started to see the error of his ways.

As it happens, the weakest element in the drama throughout hasn't changed at all. It's very much still there, and it is of course the Boys themselves. They're almost wholly unlikable and, more to the point, their motivation is seldom clear. It's possible that modern screenwriters just aren't able to create identifiable right-wing characters. But it's also possible they're just lazy. Why, for example, do our eponymous anti-heroes spend so much time just lounging around in a basement? I can't say. But it's very, very boring.

The best new addition to the series was of course new supervillain Stormfront, but by the end she's been outed as a "Nazi" and (quite literally!) disarmed. The possibility of an interesting relationship between Homelander and his son has been peremptorily curtailed. Simon Pegg's not in it anymore. Most the old cast are now more or less 'phoning in their performances. And the revelation that the new left-wing politician character (basically an Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calque) is really a baddy looks altogether doomed from the outset. We're certainly not being promised that next season's baddy will be Far-Left, to balance out this season's "Far-Right" character. In fact quite the opposite! There's little doubt that she'll eventually be exposed as a "hypocritical" liberal who's simply "sold out" to the corporatists of Vought. Her leftist ideology will no doubt remain uncritiqued.

So all-in-all something of a disappointment - and with Joe Biden back in the White House there's little prospect that it (or any of the rest of America's "cultural output") will be getting very much better anytime soon!

*And they, of course, get to decide what counts as "private".

Why does anyone create anything?

The Labour Party and the anti-anti-Semites

After they were booted out of office in 1997, the Tory Party spent a good ten years re-playing House of Cards. Everyone wanted to be FU. And every leader ended up being knifed in the back, or elegantly falling on his sword for the sake of the greater good, and/or going down to pointless, needless defeat at the polls.

On the other hand the Labour Party currently seem to be having so much fun re-enacting the final season of The Thick of It (that’s the British version of Veep, for American readers) that one wonders if they’ll ever have time to think about re-taking power. Though I suppose right now they (like the rest of us) don’t really have very much else to do.

For what it’s worth, it sounds to me a lot as if their anti-anti-Semitism* report was “leaked” by the people who wrote it for the simple reason that they don’t trust Sir Keir Starmer and they were quite sure he was going to bury it when he became leader. Which, if you think about, would have done him much more harm than this leaking stunt will. But then the Far Far Left of the Labour Party have never been known for their keen strategic intelligence.

*Rebecca Long-Bailey's friend Maxine Peake somehow managed to complain about “systemic” racism whilst peddling actual racism! Nice!

The British Establishment and the Deep State

We were supposed to believe, with thanks to the absurd Sir Kim Darroch, that Trump ditched "the Iranian nuclear deal" purely to "spite" Obama - in much the same way, presumably, as Obama pulled troops out of Iraq in order to spite George Dubya (before of course sending them back in again almost as soon as he'd been re-elected).

Unfortunately of course the story was bollocks! Sir Kim Darroch was a Deep State, British Establishment tit of the worst order. (What do we imagine he thinks about Brexit? Duh!) In reality Trump scotched the Iran treaty partly because it was crap (Obama signed off on it in spite of significant political opposition at home, partly because he could, partly to be a dick, but mainly because geopolitically he was backed into a corner after his cut-and-run policy in Iraq) and partly because he was under pressure from the neo-cons.

Because in truth there’s more to politics than just party politics, and the idea that the Israelis were just going to sit back and let the Iranians do anything and everything they liked in the region (now that Saddam’s gone, of course!) was only ever going to be a fantasy. And now that Israel has already kicked off its own “quiet” war with Iran, the Americans (and the British) are going to have to think hard and act quickly if they want to regain the initiative and stop the situation escalating.

One would of course like to be able to get excited about characters like Darroch, and Lord Geidt. And indeed about Rory Stewart, given his background! He’s got Special Forces, MI6, Deep State, ultra-Establishment, etc. written all over him. But...

One’s overwhelming sense is that beneath that nonchalant show of British phlegm the complacency is pretty much baked in. Stewart in particular comes across as simply another one of the overconfident narcissistic buffoons that Eton and Oxford between them seem to specialize in producing. Some are on the “Right”, some are on the Far Left, others are apolitical to the extent that they’re only really in politics for the sake of their wallets and their egos. Currently my feeling is that Rory is probably one of the latter, and whichever way one looks at him he’s utterly un-electable. I may be wrong, of course, but thankfully the Covid-1984 crisis has put his convoluted joke of a campaign to (fail to) be elected as Mayor of London out of the capital's misery.

And is Boris any better? The first big disappointment of the Boris era was his caving in to the old guard on Huawei. But then what were we expecting? Boris is not Trump. (And then again Trump isn’t really Trump - indeed, he’s a mostly vacuous media creation of a man who happens to be called Donald Trump, but perhaps that’s just by the by.) He was never going to face down the Establishment on this one, let alone stand up to the Deep State. (And of course Brexit got that little bit more complicated.) Even after life returns to "normal", the old problems are still going to be there - and with civil society having been so fundamentally weakened not so much by the Coronavirus itself as by the State’s response to it those old problems may very well be not just older but even worse. The British Government has never let a good crisis go to waste, and I can’t believe the Deep State ever will either.

Despite Brexit, Trump and Boris, the show will go on. And on! And on!

The Duke of York and the British Establishment

I have to say, I’m not really interested in the Duke of York, beyond saying that I think he’s probably not a nonce. The Murdoch Press want him to be, obviously, but that’s really only because Rupert Murdoch hates the Monarchy.

It’s also just possible that the reason the Queen is so protective of him is that his real father is Lord Carnarvon (i.e he of the real-life Downton Abbey).

OTOH, his relationship with Epstein was genuinely weird, and one wonders who exactly in the British secret state was “handling” him at the time.

It’s not unusual for minor royals to run on little errands if not for ministers of state then at least for the Deep State - whose official head is of course HM herself, even though in practice she can often be just as in the dark as anyone else.

And of course the more minor they are the further they can go. Let’s not forget whose nephew Princess Di herself was having it off with when she met her untimely end.

What’s tricky about Prince Andrew of course is that he’s not exactly “minor”. He’s a Prince of the Blood and a Royal Duke. His mum is literally the Queen of England. And so if the Firm really were hiring him out to other elements of the Establishment it does tend to make one wonder quite how legitimately royal he might really be.

Things to Do in Dallas When You're Bored

The first season of The Umbrella Academy was genuinely quite appealing. It was basically what you'd get if Wes Anderson did a reboot of the X-Men, and even when it wasn't wholly original it was at least knowingly so and even, at times, slightly subversive.

Season 2 tries to repeat the successes of Season 1, but it does so with an utterly leaden, beat-for-beat approach that is altogether un-involving and which at times is slightly repulsive. Indeed by trying simply to repeat the formula of the first season it completely fails to build on its successes, which has the effect of freezing the series' worldbuilding, hamstringing its plot, and all but throttling its character stone dead. Indeed by the end of Season 2 the members of the Umbrella Academy have either stayed where they were at the beginning of Season 1 or indeed regressed and become even less sympathetic (and thus less interesting) than they've ever been before.

So now for example we have a 5 who is more homicidal than ever - though to be fair he is at least still trying to save the world. Klaus meanwhile has gone clean, but then he relapses. Luther is now a rebellious and complacent git. The Rumour (because I can't even remember her name) is a self-righteous revolutionary. (Even if you think that it's fair enough that a black woman would support the race revolution in the 1960s, she's from the future. She knows that it's going to happen anyway. Why exactly is she taking out her personal problems on the white people of her grandparents' generation? Somehow I can't imagine it's because she was bullied at school for being black.) The Hispanic one is just an oaf who wants to save JFK, without caring or even thinking about the consequences. (Spoiler: He fails anyway.) And Vanya is now just an obnoxious little marriage-wrecking bean-flicker.

In other words all the characters we liked in the first season (and Vanya) are now just as unappealing as ever, nay more so. The dysfunctional family joke is no longer endearing. It's just tedious and disappointing. None of it feels fresh anymore, nor has it moved on from what went before, in terms of either character or plot.

Even the stuff about the Gallifreyan-style Time Agency (or is it the Temp Agency - which is a fun joke, if you think about it, but quite possibly one the neo-socialists who work in modern television wouldn't get?) makes no sense. If the 2019 "apocalypse" was a fixed point in time, how can the new one in 1963 be another one?

And the weirdest thing is that the show's mythology hasn't grown either. The main thing that made Season 1 so enjoyable was its inventiveness - constantly introducing new characters and ideas. And even if they weren't particularly original, at least they were introduced in an enjoyably kooky, left-field but ultimately knowing way. The old man in a child's body? It's been done before, but not for a while in a mainstream show. So why not? Time-travelling assassins? Ditto! Dysfunctional super-family? Might as well! Just turn it up to eleven. Super-intelligent chimp butlers are cool. So are robot moms. So are murder mysteries and apocalypses and adorable short trousers. Put it all together and what do you got?

My own hopes for the series - that they'd reboot the characters as children, and then have a genuine battle of minds and wills between what their father wanted them to be and what they eventually became - was obviously never going to happen. But in Season 2 there's virtually nothing new or even imaginative. We already know Hargreeves is an alien. But we don't find out anything more about him other than that. It's enough to leave one googling for Wikipedia.

Indulging in Far-Left fantasies isn't a good idea either, especially when the writers have to compensate for a singular lack of likeable negroes and lesbians by making every straight white adult male a bully and/or an incompetent buffoon. (This includes the baddies, unfortunately, making them unpleasant to no dramatic purpose and not really scary either.) Ellen Page for example is just as horrible as ever - narcissistic and one-dimensional to a tee. If your case is that she's an overgrown child actress playing a character with severely arrested psychological development then fine. But that none of the Hargreeves children has been able to form a meaningful relationship with a member of the opposite sex is something of a given. Page is just bad - and is particularly badly shown up by actual child actor Aidan Gallagher's range and energy (though in season 2 even 5 regresses to a somewhat one-dimensional mean here).

The characters hardly ever use their superpowers to move the plot along. Is this deliberate? The point that you don't need special powers to be a hero is perfectly legit. And more to the point the only dramatically satisfying victories are ones where superheroes don't use their powers. But here it's Vanya's super powers that lead to the end of the world (again!) and it's 5's time-travel powers that end up saving the day (again!).

The villains meanwhile have almost no motivation. (The Handler wants to make the time commission more "jazzy". That is literally it.) And the heroes just aren't motivated - with the exception of Aidan Gallagher, who still has just enough teenage energy to make his own scenes interesting, but not nearly enough to save this season in the way he both literally and figuratively saved the first. In fact both literally and figuratively the Umbrella Academy is more than the sum of its parts, and by splitting up the characters to do different boring things (boring boxing, boring asylum, boring sex cult, boring civil rights pressure group, boring nanny to a beautiful but boring autistic boy, etc.) we see just how boring each character is by himself.

What really drove the first season were the back stories and the flashbacks. They're almost entirely missing from the second season. What made us fall in love (or at least mildly warm to) the characters of The Umbrella Academy was that we were able to see the "good" versions of them (in their adorable short trousers and knee-socks). And yes, turning the Monocle from being a proud papa, who rewards his prepubescent charges with ice cream each time they save the day, into a straight-up dick (albeit an extra-terrestrial one) was definitely a mistake. Interestingly one of the few good things about Season 2 was the partial "redemption" of Hargreeves, but we'll see if this is a story-arc the show's writers are really going to continue with in Season 3.

And Season 3 need not (yet) be a total write-off. Arguably the biggest problem with Season 2 was a lack of source material, in principle because of how much of the second Umbrella Academy comic book went into Season 1. Well there's one more comic book still to go, and perhaps another in the pipeline, so it's to be hoped that the Sparrow Academy may offer some return to form next year.

But as usual we'll see.