Just go crazy in your own time…

Moriarty: ‘I owe you, Sherlock’.

Cut to close-up of badly-cast actor’s babyface.

Then, just in case we didn’t catch that: ‘I. Owe. You.’

A minute later, just in case we didn’t catch that, Sherlock picks up an apple with which Moriarty has been fiddling. Knife plunged into middle of apple. Carved into apple: ‘I O U’

Ahhhh… now we get it.

The first sign that the drama’s not working is that everyone has to scream at each other. (I call this ‘the Truly Madly Deeply moment’, as per Juliet Stevenson’s snot-laden grief-porn crying scene in that movie.) It’s a sign that the filmmaker has nothing really to show us. It’s drama imitating reality TV.

In Episide 3 of Series 2, the trivial-looking lunatic Moriarty and Sherlock both spend a lot of time screaming at people, including each other. Perhaps it’s because Moriarty’s supposed to be a psychopath (a real one, not like sexily dysfunctional Sherlock): but merely being a fruitcake isn’t enough to make him interesting. The screaming certainly isn’t making him look like a criminal mastermind. And if it’s intended to make us, the viewers, see that this episode is extra-specially tense – well, it doesn’t feel tense. It just feels a bit hysterical.

The second sign is this plodding need to say everything twice. Or three times. To explain the action as it goes along. There are a few possible reasons to use this device:

  • You don’t think the audience is capable of keeping up
  • You’ve forgotten that you’re in charge of making sure they keep up
  • You’re not quite keeping up, and like to remind yourself as you write
  • You can’t think of anything else to make them say

The third sign is that the drama introduces its meta-issues through the medium of the characters talking about them. Declaring the secret frissons is in my book the most common, and the worst, way to jump the shark. Simultaneously mythmaking, and discussing your mythmaking.

I began to worry in what might even have been the first episide of Series 1. The ploddingly dull policewoman describes Holme’s (we can still call him Holmes?) character, calling him psychopathic (or something), and predicting to Watson that he’ll go beyond his petty fixation on solving crimes and commit one himself. This is very boring and unearned. I remembered it because, in this last episode, this same pedestrian character says to Watson: ‘See? I told you he was going to commit a crime’. This is of course a sign that she’s been duped by Moriarty’s evil plan to make everyone think Sherlock has committed the crime – and I admit that it’s quite nice and clever to refer back to something from over a year ago. If her delivery hadn’t been so wooden we might have taken it for the bit of dramatic devil’s-advocacy it seems meant to be, but it just reminded me how lame that dialogue was last time.

And I seem to recall that in Episode 1 the policewoman also categorised Sherlock as ‘autistic’. Why spell it out? Why not just depict it, use a sort of ASD model for the character (a very interesting twist) and then leave us to draw our conclusions or not? Trendy sanctimonious label. Plod plod.

Jumping the shark in Series 2:

  • The deerstalker. One gag, he grabbed out of the costumes in a theatre & wore it for five minutes? Fine. Several conversations in each episode? It’s too central to the iconography. To let Watson tell Holmes, ‘It’s just become a Sherlock Holmes hat now’? Appallingly bad.
  • Watson’s worried people will think he’s gay. One joke: fine. Conversations in each episode? The boring girlfriend in Episode whatever-it-was accusing him of being a ‘good boyfriend – to Sherlock’? No.
  • Everyone talking the whole time about Sherlock’s personality. First, we already had this when the policewoman said he was autistic. More problematically, it strips the jokes that are any good of their power: as in the bit of business where he gets given thank-you presents he doesn’t want, and Holmes has to tell him to say thank you. This comes back later when Polly the lab woman tells him he could at least say thank you, and he says it – but, brilliantly, he says it as if he actually has no idea why. Once we’ve seen this we really have no need to see Mrs Hudson blustering on about ‘what he’s like’.

I don’t know what ‘Renegade 3′ was, but this quote from the page I linked to above did resonate in the current context:

“Renegade 3 didn’t so much jump the shark as repeatedly jump up and down on the shark, whilst screaming, ‘Look at me, I’m Mr. Jumpy-Sharko.’”
— Stuart Ashen, Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, “Renegade 3: The Final Chapter”

A final word about Moriarty. That punky thing, I’m sure he’s meant to be a bit on the edge, a bit irrational, more evil because out of control – but it isn’t working, guys. He reminds me more than anyone of the troublesome-kid-gone-bad, Syndrome, in The Incredibles. And then he’s a nutcase. In the final screaming scene on the rooftop – where they’re both just screaming in each other’s faces like the least effective criminal and sleuth in the world – Moriarty screams into Holme’s face that he’s a ‘doofus’. Doofus! CLANK.

It’s even a word that Syndrome would use.But The Incredibles is sixties pastiche, so that would be fine.

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'I'm just not sure that third line in stanza two is really working...'

In the middle of everything else going on this week was Tuesday: of course, teaching night for me at the Poetry School.

The course is called ‘Making Poetry’ and covers in three terms the basics of prosody – that is, poetic technique.

This week we began to unpick the mysteries of rhyming ‘cat’ with ‘dog’ – maybe not so basic after all, I’m turning them into magicians – and I sent the class home with a homework assignment: to find a word of two syllables, any word you like the sound of, and make as many pararhymes for it as you possibly can, or can find the time to.

Here’s how it works. You keep the consonants the same, and change the vowels. Easy!

But you can also change the consonants to neighbour sounds, as in k/g, p/b, t/d etc. And also, you can vary the placement of the vowels too if you find something and it works. Like all magic, it is essentially a question of manipulating the materials.

‘So’, as Don Paterson says, in his famous ‘Dark Arts of Poetry’ essay:

in ‘cat’ we hear hard ‘k’ and ‘t’, and can derive kite, cute, acute, cockatoo, biscuit, Cato… also, from close consonants, words like caddy, gateaux, god, Agadoo…

He describes how the Torah is printed without vowels, and must be ‘envoweled’ by us – which is the simple origin of centuries of interpretation and disagreement! He mentions the Kabbalah, and says:

In our art, pararhyming treats the mind as a sacred book. Once this series of secret cognates has been generated – Kabbalah, cable, quibble, cobble, equable, Keble, cue-ball, likeable, blackball, accapella, copla – they must be made sense of, and connected by the memory and imagination, which they simultaneously interrogate.

You get the idea.

Off you go! Homework on the blog. Word lists in the comments please. Maybe for the blog, keep it to ten, but make them good ones.

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Etta James: another legend passes

January 20, 2012

Happy music. And an inspiration. And, you know: not many people cooler-looking than Etta James.                   I’m just going to post this now: I keep changing the video – but it’s all good. And I won’t go into the whole sadness thing. She’s a testament to life [...]

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Whirligig poetry week, continued: this world, and the something beyond

January 19, 2012

So after the TS Eliot Prize reading on Sunday, I went along to the award ceremony on Monday, which was conducted this year live on television – possibly because of being, as the Guardian put it, ‘the most controversial TS Eliot poetry prize in decades’. But once Oswald and Kinsella had dropped out, I thought [...]

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Poetry, the works do: Eliot Prize reading 2012

January 16, 2012

Right! I’ve managed to get my content management system problem sorted out just in time for last night’s TS Eliot Prize reading, which is as any fule kno the Poetry Event of the Year. From its humble beginnings (when I started going it was in the Bloomsbury Theatre and getting rather squished in the foyer; [...]

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Life in the bookshop!

January 11, 2012

This has gone up on the Guardian now, but in case you missed it – it more or less depicts what my relationship with books has always been like. This is a ‘meaning of life’ Wednesday Special. We look everywhere for the meaning of life. Sometimes it’s right in front of our nose. This (more [...]

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The enemy is within…

January 10, 2012

… and with that, the new world comes crashing in! BANG. Can you believe what you’re looking at? On THIS blog? I had about three things I wanted to write here, and now I can’t remember ANY of them. No, I can, and I miss the days when I used to write interesting amusing things. [...]

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Something’s gotta give: the Baroque 10-step plan for 2012

January 9, 2012

Love this. Get the mustard roll-necks. Last year I wrote a rather hard-hitting – well, I thought it was hard-hitting, but in retrospect it’s rather sweet – welcome to the new year post. I was already feeling weary from the recession, and all the unemployment and job-changing, and living off my life savings, and personal [...]

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