So, that’s what football is about. The appeal of depositing a leather sphere into a goalmouth has never really been made clear to me. Growing up, I got the imprints about alcohol, girls, and drugs more or less sorted, but cars and sport were always a lost cause for me. I enjoy swimming, and have been known to knock a shuttlecock over a net, but that’s as far as it goes.

The idea of watching a film about football might seem baffling then. But I’d heard good things about The Damned United from people whose opinions I respect. Besides, it’s written by Peter Morgan, who among other reality based dramas is responsible for The Queen, which I thought was excellent. So, more reason to view. Besides which — for those who read the last entry — my father remains in hospital in a bad way, and distractions like tv and blogging are welcome.

Anyway, the story concerns male relationships, which is interesting stuff. And when you’ve got a protagonist as rich as Brian Clough, there’s no excuse for making a bad script. And Morgan’s is quite the opposite. Clough is a fascinating man, whose different aspects are perhaps paradoxical at first sight. He’s an egotist who brings the best out of others. A man with a thick skin who bears grudges — most especially against Leeds manager Don Revie. A singular talent reliant on a sidekick, in the form of Peter Taylor.

The double act of Clough and Taylor is what the film is about. It’s set in the 44 day period when Clough managed Leeds, having done a sterling job at bringing Derby up from the arse end of the second division with Taylor to talent spot unlikely but perfect players for him. Taylor understands the big picture and dynamics in a way that Clough doesn’t. For his part, Clough has an extraordinary ability to coax winning performances from his team through playing psychological jitsui with them.

It makes for gripping drama, Clough doing wonders at Derby and then losing it all in a feat of brinksmanship that sees him and Taylor heading to Brighton when Clough foolhardily offers his and Taylor’s resignation and the chairman uses the opportunity to rid himself of trouble. Clough’s ego is monumental, but it needs to be to drive eleven men to perform to their best, and to deal with the backstage politics behind it all.

Anyway, it’s not long before Clough is at Leeds — but without Taylor at his side. The players don’t take to him. His take is that they’ve only won as many games as they have because they play dirty. His job is to maintain the track record, but get the players to clean up their acts so they can feel good about what they’re doing.

It’s an uphill struggle. The Leeds players see no reason to change their hack and slash tactics, and don’t take kindly to Clough bringing in new blood to the team — choices that maybe he wouldn’t have made if Taylor were still his right hand man. It all goes horribly wrong, which is why Clough lasts just over six weeks at the Leeds ground.

Like I say, I don’t get football. But I get people. And this is a film about people in conflict whether they need to be or not. Clough’s willing to bring the fight to anyone, and not always wisely. His ambition needs to be tempered with Taylor’s genius for team chemistry. And ultimately the two get together again to fight another day — the film rightly concentrates on the period of Clough and Taylor’s fallout, before their ascension with Nottingham Forest, who they bring to unparalleled glory thanks to their unbeatable dynamic.

The last time I spoke to my dad, Ray, he said the story of his stay in hospital would make a good script. As ever, his ability to find something in the situation that I’d enjoy came to the fore. Even, in this case, when he’s suffering from cancer of the spine. A broken arm, the consequence of his weakened bones. And a chest infection that he’s finding it hard to fight because of the weakness of his immune system. I’m travelling to see him tomorrow, and maybe we’ll find out how that story ends.

My dad and stories go together. He’s told them all my life, and that’s a large part of where my love of stories comes from. When I was young, and Ray lectured at a university, many of the people he befriended were foreign students. I got to meet them, and hear their stories, and they too became part of my father’s stories. Babalola the Nigerian, whose mother was a village butcher, and instructed us to ‘feather’ the goat we kept at one point, and who on going strawberry picking with us ate pounds of the fruit when he discovered that pickers were allowed to eat them too, bringing back an empty punnet to be weighed. Seet from Singapore, who thought that the signs on the motorway with numbers in them depicted the minimum speeds that motorists should travel. Yogesvaran — Yogi — from Malaysia, who played hours long games of Risk and wooed Kamala, who was less than half his size.

And then there are the stories that Ray himself features in. Buying blouses and liqueurs at auction and keeping them in a garage at home, to be sold to a dizzying array of acquaintances. Installing an artificial tree in a pub on one or other of the jobs he acquired kitting them out with interiors, a business timed brilliantly as the breweries were looking to camouflage their profits from the Monopolies Commission and were chucking cash at the problem. Drunkenly snogging a woman not my mother on the roof of a golfcart careering down a hill in Switzerland on a family holiday. Calling his sister while she was alone at a friend’s place and saying he was from the pools company, and could she pass on a message to the lady of the house..? To be fair, he did leave enough clues in what he said for her to rumble the truth. But it was a surprisingly long time before they spoke after that.

And then there were the books that he passed on to me. I was given a set of encyclopedias that he’d read as a child, sturdy volumes with tales of Empire, and illustrations accompanying legends from Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. Fantastic stuff, which fed my liking for the books of Henry Treece, and collections of heroic tales from different cultures. I’ve never got round to your actual Iliad and Odyssey, but I enjoyed the kids’ versions just fine.

And, thanks to my dad, I got a good education in films from an early age. I was haunted by The Red Balloon each and every time I watched it, which was lots. I followed my dad’s own childhood liking for Sabu, and it led me to The Thief of Baghdad which in turn opened up the world of 1001 Nights, which enthralls me to this day.

Later, in my teens, he took me to see Kagemusha, my first experience of Kurosawa. He’d caught the director’s samurai films as they appeared, at what were probably their only screenings in Birmingham in the days before arthouse cinema. We’ve talked film lots since then, part of the way we relate, and that continues to this day. He’s spent his retirement in fine style, watching a few decades’ worth of films he missed out on first time round, emphasising European and world cinema in the choices that drop through the mailbox once a week.

And now? My father’s story is coming to an end. Those are hard words to write. Harder to accept. But that’s how it is. Ray has led a better life than most, touched the lives of others in the process. Mine especially. And I hope I’m writing in a week that he’s making a good recovery, and will be with us for another twenty years. But that sounds a bit Hollywood to me, and that’s really not my dad’s style.

Pick a film. One with guns and knives in it. What are the chances that the first of a group of characters to die — whether from an army platoon or a street gang — will be black? It happens often enough that it’s frankly embarrassing: exactly what is it about non-white characters that makes it easier to dispense with them quickly rather than write them convincingly into the story?

Part of the answer is that filmmaking is overwhelmingly a white male business. There are few enough credible roles for women (especially those over 40): why would there be good ones for non-white actors? Depressing, huh? It doesn’t get much better when you think about the black characters that white writers come up with. Witness the phenonomenon of the magical negro…

Even the name makes my flesh creep…the magical negro is a character seemingly in touch with mystical powers, which he’s willing to put at the service of a white protagonist for whom he will sacrifice his own life. Stephen King has perpetrated more than his fair share of this stereotype — look at The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining and The Stand for filmed examples.

Magical negroes aren’t exclusively male — the Whoopi Goldberg character in Star Trek: The Next Generation is never short of a homily when she serves drinks in the ship bar. Oracle is another insightful black mama, in The Matrix, which also features Morpheus being black and portentuous. Were such characters three dimensional, there’d not be a problem here — the issue is that they’re formed with the same cookie cutter. If Morgan Freeman is to be believed, God Himself is a magical negro, at least if Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty are anything to go by

Much the same charge can be levelled at the martial arts masters and priests portrayed in western films. Whereas white guys over 50 can be adulterers, assassins, husbands and heroes, if your ancestry is Asian it’s inevitable that you’ll sprout a beard and spout wisdom. Nice work if you can get it, if you’re an actor…but the perpetuation of stereotypes helps nobody. Sure: there really are wise old heads of martial arts schools, but I’d lay money they’re outnumbered by mortgage advisors and civil servants and other people whose stories I’d love to see.

How do we change the racial cliches that tv and film perpetuate? I’ve taught writing classes to maybe 200 people, less than 10% of them non-white. But among their number have been some of the sharpest writers I’ve come across — one Asian woman has gone on to write a fairly well-received novel, a Caribbean woman and two Asian men have made short films, and I’m working with a non-caucasian filmmaker on a feature project.

I have mixed feelings about positive discrimination, but am all in favour of the BBC’s plans to increase the numbers of non-white writers working for the corporation. There’s more to it than that though: the whole culture of drinks-based networking is something that suits white males more than it does other people. If your religion prevents you from drinking, or you’ve got childcare to think about, a lot of industry events aren’t as welcoming as you might imagine.

It’s the 21st century. But I find that hard to believe when I go to a cinema to see a popcorn blockbuster in the form of Transformers and am presented with alien robots who have unaccountably acquired a taste for behaving like something from the bad old days of Black & White Minstrels. If you don’t get the wrongness of that characterisation, the problem of race and media is even bigger than I thought.

You’ve got to hand it to Warren Ellis: the man has a way with an interesting setting. And in Ignition City he’s come up with one that’s a summation of one strand of his fascinations. The titular location is a seedy sprawling urban blemish on an artificial island created to house the remnants of Earth’s dwindling space programme. That alone sounds great, and artist Gianluca Pagliarani does a sterling job conveying the rusting hulks of rockets and lunar freighters, home to former space heroes who eke out a hand to mouth existence in return for food pills that give them long term bowel problems.

But don’t get carried away with the physicality of this place: Ignition City is really a venue for ideas to take form. In this case, it’s a way for Ellis to contrast the glory days of science fiction, when futuristic rocketmen soared through the cosmos zapping aliens they came across, with today’s more cynical pluralist world, where those same aliens now run foodstalls that offer a healthier diet to the hasbeen rocket jockeys than the food pills they complain about so much.

Into this decrepit setting comes Mary Raven, a young woman seeking the truth about her father’s death. Starstruck since childhood by the astronauts and cosmonauts who were part of her dad’s world, Mary is understandably appalled by what’s become of the once shiny suited men, not least because it looks like one of them is responsible for killing her father.

It all kind of works, but not with the finesse that say Orbiter and Fell pull together. Having established what Ignition City is like, I feel that Ellis spends rather too much time indulging his partiality for somewhat gross scenes — the sort that his audience love but which contain some of the most tiresome of his writing tropes — and not enough on a more effectively plotted story than the yarn he actually delivers. Which is a shame: Ellis firing on all cylinders is a fine thing, and I’d like to see it happen more often.

Anyway, I’m glad that I ended up paying less than £5 for Ignition City: I can sympathise with Avatar Press, one of the smaller comics publishers, but a lot of their collected editions are close to the £20 mark, and I’m not sure that enough of them are worth it. In practice, it seems that Ellis’s Apparat novellas for Avatar, including his first brilliant collaboration with Pagliarani, the superb Aetheric Mechanics, the historical piece Crecy, and reflective literary tale Frankenstein’s Womb, are — with their smaller page count — better indicators of what Ellis can achieve when he truly disciplines himself, than some of his larger projects.

Ignition City ends at a point where Mary Raven has rallied the moribund spacetrash residents and got them fired up in a way that they’ve not felt for years. It’s a reasonable resolution, and it points to another installment of the story to come. Will I stick around for it? The jury is out. The writing is fairly lazy at times, and Gianluca’s art is variable — his background work is often excellent, but at times his figures and faces aren’t consistent, and there’s a mismatch in styles between characters and setting that I can understand from a pragmatic viewpoint but deprives the reader of the richer experience that could have been were the elements integrated more happily.

Truth is I want to like Ignition City more than I actually do. The idea of a town populated by grizzled space hacks is more entertaining than the reality Ellis delivers. It’s a conceptual space more than a realised one. I appreciate the idea, and the effort that went into it — but more effort could have made Ignition City a truly unique story.

Here we go again. Feedback time. When you’re writing a script, you need to maintain your belief that it’s good. If you didn’t, you’d be crippled by doubt about what you’re doing and never actually get it done. But once that first draft is done, and you’ve justifiably rewarded yourself for completing it, the journey recommences.

At this point what you need could usefully be called Wise Counsel. People to send your script to who will read it intelligently, whether they’re writers or filmmakers or whatever they are, and offer constructive feedback. It’s that bit of the process when, having sent off your child’s photo to the local paper for the Bonnie Baby Competition, readers send in letters suggesting that your baby is in fact the most pug-ugly creature they’ve laid eyes on.

Well, that’s how it can seem. But feedback always offers something of value, if only confirmation of the wisdom of sending the script to that particular person. Where my recently completed script The Devil You Know is concerned, I’ve in fact received very valuable and high quality notes from two sources: a filmmaker I’ve been helping to develop a feature script, and a producer who’s worked on some notable features and has more in her future.

Having sent the script to those two in particular, I’m in no position to complain about what they might have to say. But thankfully they agree that my script has considerable potential, even if it’s not attained it yet. Bloody hell — all these years later, and it’s school reports all over again.

More than that, both suggest that upping the thriller aspect of the story can only be a good thing. Which was a slightly contentious issue for me initially. The story draws from my experiences of a mental hospital stay, and as such is very personal. All very well, but I also want it to be a commercially viable feature film, and not a piece of self-involved drek. Moreover, both filmmaker and producer agree that there’s a rich story in there. And I can’t help but agree. Looked at again, I can see that there needs to be more work done on developing the crime aspect of the story. Currently everything is wrapped up neatly and it all resolves in a nice way for the protagonist.

At which point I’m thinking ‘how could I have not spotted that before?’. An easier question to ask than to answer. I like a degree of messiness in a story, and at the moment mine is too neat. It needs to be kicked about and scuffed, some of the existing plot elements developed further, and integrated with new ones that will confuse the situation the protagonist is in, making it even more appropriate that he spends most of the story in a mental hospital.

But of course, we all have 20/20 hindsight. Especially when we’ve been given notes by sussed people whose opinions count. So…back to the drawing board? Not quite. I can see the faultlines in the script more clearly now, and that makes it easier to work with them. There are a couple of minor characters in the busy scene that opens the story who could valuably play a bit of a role in making the scenario more complex, less black and white. Just the sort of thing I need to make the world that bit murkier for a protagonist who’s already going through hell. Poor bastard.

That said, the more he suffers in the story, the bigger the emotional payoff will be when his situation is resolved. When I stop tormenting him and let him finish the story with a metaphorical spring in his step, knowing that whatever happens in his life from now, it can never be as bad as what he’s just been through.

Unless the film does well. And someone suggests a sequel.

Hmm, so a couple of days back I posted about my favourable first impressions of Firefly having watched the pilot episode. Since when I’ve watched…well, after writing this piece I’ll be onto episode three of disk three, which will be my tenth of the fourteen installments that made up the series. After which I’ll give renewed attention to the Serenity feature film spinoff which I will view again with added insight into it all.

Last time I watched that much of a show in a short space of time was when I got into The Shield. Which raises the question of exactly what Joss Whedon has done to give his show such a strong pull. Firefly maintains my attention throughout, more so than Buffy even, which had more than its share of off-centre episodes. (Interesting, the distinction between off-beat, which can be good, and off-centre, which isn’t.)

Part of the skill is in getting the audience to root for the characters. As with Buffy, they’re an interesting bunch — and rather than go for obvious conflict between them, as so many shows do, what bonds them is just as important as what pulls them apart. Conflict for its own sake can be dull, but with characters who play valuable roles in each others lives, and depend on one another, those bonds are just as important as the potential for breaking them. And those bonds run deeper than the technical function of the character roles.

Look at the interaction of Captain Mal Reynolds and Companion Inara for instance. At first sight, he seems to look down on the interplanetary escort girl. Look a little further, and you realise Mal has a touch of insecurity about sexually independent women. And their relationship is more than professional. It’s all beautifully depicted in the episode Our Mrs Reynolds, written by Whedon himself. Mal is duped into marriage by a woman who first seems a naive farm girl, but turns out to be a sophisticated con artist who knows exactly which buttons to press to get the results she wants. She uses a toxic lipstick to knock Mal out, and Inara kisses the captain in an attempt to bring him round, which sends her woozy too — a kiss born of genuine attraction as much as for medical reasons. Only, Mal goes for the easier conclusion that Inara was affected by the lipstick since she kissed the conwoman — his edginess about Inara being bisexual, and more sexually sophisticated than he is, won’t allow him to see that Inara really is drawn to him.

Fantastic stuff, beautifully played — but the above sounds like soap opera more than science fiction. Well, truth is that the science fiction aspects of the show are very much to do with the environment and trappings. This is not drama that comes from scientific concepts — science is not one of Firefly’s drivers at all. Not in the sense of episodes being based on stuff that the writers have picked up in New Scientist anyway. But there’s a rich story universe here, with the characters flitting between planets that mostly resemble the wild west because they’ve been terraformed to look that way. And there’s a backdrop involving a semi-evil Alliance that won the war against the Independents Mal fought for. You can tell they’re the bad guys because of their love of red tape, and they’ve done something unspeakable to the doctor’s strange sister, River.

Firefly proves that all a series needs to work is interesting and well-played characters. Sure, the fact that they flit about in a spaceship is fun — but a lot of that stuff is set dressing. More than anything, this is a series about how people get on in their very different ways, and how enjoyable it is to see that when those people are more or less functional and typically inclined to look out for one another. As such, it’s a more human and compelling future than those offered by most tv science fiction shows.

Sometimes a show’s central metaphors are obvious to its creators. Other times, they’re so embedded in the show that they pass unquestioned. With Star Trek, you can’t get away from the sense that what you’re watching is American foreign policy in outer space. Uniformed men patrolling the frontiers in a heavily armed vessel claiming a non-interventionist stance but forever imposing their values on the foreigners they encounter — yeah, that feels about right.

So powerful is that notion of space as a military domain that it affects other science fiction shows too: it’s a rubric that also shapes Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. Which is fine as far as it goes. Interesting that British tv science fiction, coming from a country that’s through with its imperial past and questioning that legacy, is more sceptical — Dr Who is a maverick pacifist, and the heroes of Blake’s 7 were political radicals fighting against the state rather than on its behalf.

After the success of Buffy, Joss Whedon wanted to make a science fiction show, and it’s typical of his scale of vision that he looked beyond predecessor shows and came up with his own rough and ready version of a universe to have adventures in for Firefly. The protagonist is Malcolm Reynolds, who is established in the pilot episode as a soldier on the wrong side of a war, now turning his hand to shifting cargo round the cosmos to make ends meet. He does so in an outdated Firefly class spaceship with the assistance of a crew of misfits. Their roles — pilot, engineer, medic — are familiar from Star Trek, but without a uniform or code of conduct to bind them together, the captain relies on leadership skills and an understanding of the bigger picture to guide his crew. Tension about where the ship goes, and how, is an important part of the fabric of the show.

I suspect that the way Firefly works is in large part a function of Whedon’s experience in delivering episode after episode and season after season of Buffy , the captain of his own ship for sure — and up against powers that be in the form of networks, advertisers, actors growing in popularity, and audience expectations. On the basis of the pilot episode at least, Malcolm Reynolds has more responsibilities than the other members of the ship Serenity, and isn’t as readily open to identification as teenagers would have found high school girl Buffy. Which may be one reason for the show having been cancelled after 14 episodes — though the network opening the series with an episode several stories in, rather than the intended pilot, may have a part to play too.

The central metaphor that Firefly uses is that of the western. It’s not hammered home too heavily, other than in the country-tinged theme song, and there are interesting detours from that central notion — such as the occasional use of phrases in Chinese by the characters. But the design aesthetic of the spaceport they visit, and later of a planet where they hope to turn a profit, is one very much drawn from notions of the Wild West. One of the more interesting parallels is the presence on Firefly of a woman described as a ‘companion’, but who Mal charmlessly refers to as a whore. She rents the spaceship’s shuttle vehicle and operates from there, itself a fascinating notion: whoever heard of subletting a spaceship before?

There’s a city slicker on board too, and it’s with his presence that the future of the series lies — the rich boy doctor came aboard, disguising his sister as cargo, and trouble lies ahead: her mind is the subject of experimentation, and she’s an asset that the bad guys want to recoup. It all makes for a healthily eclectic mix, though perhaps too varied for an audience that historically likes its science fiction shows a bit more cut and dried. But the vitality of the concept, and some typically sparkling Whedon dialogue, make for a highly appealing premiere, and a show I’ve got another 13 episodes of to hopefully enjoy.

A little while back, I looked at the theological aspects of how Ashes to Ashes, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica wrapped up. Now, with the conclusion of Matt Smith’s first season as the Gallifreyan gadabout, it’s worth having a look at how Dr Who functions — and its resonance with one of my favourite films, Donnie Darko.

Under Stephen Moffat’s stewardship, Dr Who has been a more successfully integrated series than it was under the guidance of Russell T Davies. Where Russell unified the show was in its themes, and particularly its vision of a future in which polychromatic polymorphous perversity would hold sway over the universe like a camp tentacled version of a Benetton ad. Evil was narrow minded, fearful of diversity, and good would triumph through the power of love.

All lovely stuff, but it got a bit repetitious, and there was rather a lot of handwaving at the expense of credible story detail. Which is what makes Moffat’s approach so interesting, and different. Admittedly, some of the individual episodes — Moffat’s in particular — weren’t as strong as they could have been. But the threads connecting them have really demonstrated the time and space spanning nature of the Doctor’s adventures in a way that the series hasn’t seen before.

As with RTD’s use of Rose Tyler, Moffat’s championing of new companion Amy Pond has been at the heart of the show. More than was the case in days of old, companions provide the critical human dimension to stories that could otherwise be abstract, especially for a show that is — let us remember — rightly aimed at a family audience.

Interesting that there’s been a tonal shift too: under RTD, there was quite a bit of playing to the gallery in the form of farting monsters and other playground-friendly stuff. With Moffat, the connection with children is at the heart of the series in a fundamentally serious way, through the business of why exactly young Amy Pond was living in a house on her own when the Doctor first encountered her. And ultimately it’s through the imagination, memory, and stubbornness of Amy that the series reaches its triumphant conclusion.

What connects Donnie Darko with this series of Dr Who is none other than Jesus Christ. All three sacrifice their lives that we may progress in our own. Which is pretty big stuff for stories aimed at young people, and appropriately so. Kids have a natural fascination with matters of philosophy, and when they’re captured in story form the effect can be very powerful indeed.

There’s even more similarity between Donnie and the Doctor at first glance, when you realise that both intend to sacrifice themselves with the world being none the wiser. Both are more than willing to make that sacrifice, but the distinction between the two is that while Donnie fills that Christ template pretty well, the Doctor has more than a little of the trickster about his make-up.

That trickster element is why the Doctor’s enemies line up to have him incarcerated in the Pandorica — the Doctor not recognising in the description of its captive as the most dangerous being in the universe a description of himself. And it’s that same trickster pluck which gives him the solution to the apocalyptic conundrum that results: he knows that Amy has the capacity to will him back into existence through the elaborate thread that he weaves through her life.

And really, that’s the difference between Donnie and the Doctor — the teenager has humility, where the old man from Gallifrey has the desire to see even more of space and time as he adventures another day, setting off in the TARDIS on another madcap quest like nothing has happened as he whisks Amy and her beau away from their wedding and into the beyond…

I’m so impressionable. A few weeks ago, I saw an excellent Australian comedian called Steve Hughes supporting the just as excellent American comic Reginald D Hunter. They share an edgy approach to contentious material about race, sex, and gender that was liberating to hear, both voicing thoughts that challenged my flabby thinking — revealed under scrutiny to be little more than the received wisdom accrued by an essentially liberal reader.

I was challenged, provoked, excited. And took particular delight in the contention proposed by Mr Hughes that ‘no one has the right not to be offended’. Damn straight, I thought, and filed the thought away along with other half-digested nuggets. And, you know, Steve has a point. When it comes down to it, what’s the difference between someone offended by obscene language, and me taking offence at Oasis for aping The Beatles without the bits that made the Fab Four fab in the first place?

More than that, Steve has a follow-up to his free speech stance…taking offence doesn’t damage your liver, or cause anyone to lose money, so exactly what is it that’s at stake? And I parroted that too, as an impressionable full grown man does when taken with a comedian who seems to have the answers to life. I should have spotted the mancrush for what it was — a recognition that someone is doing something cool that I’d like to do, but frankly lack the nuts for.

Just as Reginald D Hunter doesn’t go through life dealing with bullshit in a pithy baritone without encountering some resistance, nor can I reasonably expect to conduct my business in a frank and vulgar manner without getting feedback that my directness is unwarranted. There are consequences for everything we do, and saying that speaking freely has no side-effects is disingenuous. I choose not to remind my size-conscious female friends about that, knowing that the bad feelings they will experience are as real as the ones suffered by the mother of a Downs’ Syndrome child when Frankie Boyle made jokes about same. Where Mr Boyle is concerned, I feel nothing but contempt: humour used against worthy targets is a fine thing. Kids with Downs’ are pretty much at the bottom of society’s ladder — exactly what is achieved by making them the butt of crude humour?

And yet…and yet…I admire the work of William Burroughs for breaking boundaries in its depiction of sexuality and drugs, and for fucking with language itself. I salute Chris Rock for the bravery and honesty of some of his race-based humour. I can see the beauty in the Serrano photo Piss Christ.

Years ago, I came across a gentleman who called himself Rodney Orpheus. He was in a band called The Cassandra Complex, and one of their songs was called — honest — ‘Pagans are the Niggers of the World’. Which just seemed to me to be trying too hard. The title alludes, as you may be aware, to a John Lennon song where women are ascribed that status…and where women are concerned there’s something to consider when the comparison is made. But pagans? Who the fuck even knows what a pagan is in the modern era? Aspiring to being denigrated on the level that black people have been — on the basis of something they have no control over — when paganism is a lifestyle choice…well, it’s a very special kind of ridiculous.

There’s little more I can say, and there is no one clear point to get across where these matters are concerned. Sorry, but that’s how it is with some things. I find myself caught in a dance between poles, one captured in this clip which splices together performances from Richard Pryor and George Carlin, where both are talking about Mr Orpheus’s favourite N word.

I first encountered Frank Sidebottom when I bought his science fiction themed EP twenty odd years ago as a student in Sheffield. The felt tip drawn cover, the Casio keyboard versions of everything from the Star Trek theme to Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, the Timperley-centric mythology running through the EP and everything else Sidebottom did…it all added up to a package that fascinated me. Besides, who wouldn’t love a man who performed in a papier mache head, with a handpuppet version of himself called Little Frank, and did unaccountably hilarious versions of everything from Queen to Joy Division?

A couple of years later I was working in Hertford, with a fellow Sidebottom devotee called Ben, when we heard that Frank would be playing at London’s legendary Marquee Club. Famed for gigs by Jimi Hendrix and other rock icons, it seemed a curious venue for a slightly macabre childrens’ performer — but exactly where would Sidebottom be at home? Later gigs in museums and galleries confirmed the breadth and depth of his appeal.

I can’t remember details of that Marquee evening, except that it was a thoroughly entertaining show, and that Ben distinguished himself by fainting and breaking his glasses. Oh the fun we had driving back to Hertford, Ben at the wheel and me directing him from the passenger seat as the only person in the car with vision beyond ten feet. I caught Sidebottom live again some years later, but nothing could live up to that special night, where I first encountered catchphrases and props that had me smiling all over again as I watched clips from Frank’s shows on YouTube.

The reason for these reminiscences? Frank Sidebottom, or the man who created him, is dead. I won’t name the person behind the bulbous paper head, and I mean no disrespect by that. Sidebottom will live on in the memories of those, of all ages, who encountered him as a tv show guest, a football pundit, or the world’s least likely purveyor of Smiths covers.

Last year, my friend Niki was arranging a family festivity day for the company she works for. The idea was to have something for everyone, and she asked if I had any ideas. Hmm. I always have ideas, and this one was fun. Niki is an online acquaintance of Independent IT columnist Rhodri Marsden, who as well as being a journalist played keyboards — for Scritti Politti and…Frank Sidebottom.

I suggested Niki use her connection with Rhodri to get Frank to appear as the headliner of the event. What could be better for a day of family fun? Niki loved the idea, and ran it past her boss, who apparently collapsed laughing at the prospect…but pointed out the salient fact that a significant percentage of his business’s employees are from Eastern Europe, and might not get the subtle nuances involved in a bulbous headed Lancastrian doing amateurish renditions of The Beatles repertoire.

In the end, they opted for a petting zoo instead of booking Frank. I can see the sense of that decision, but personally I’d have chosen Sidebottom in the confidence that his dressing up box charisma could win over any audience given the opportunity. Why risk little children being bitten by exotic spiders when the whole family could be entertained by a singalong of ‘Mull of Kintyre’? And I wouldn’t put it past Frank to be familiar with equivalent repertoire from the Macedonian charts, or Bulgarian light entertainment shows, and engage the Eastern Europeans on their own territory.

But hey, that’s all in the land of make-believe, and meanwhile there are people out there who never had the privilege of seeing Frank Sidebottom for real. Here he is doing an unikely take on Love Will Tear Us Apart. Here, a Queen medley. And here, a discussion of his run-in with The Beatles back in the day.