Monthly Archives: November 2014

Imitation of Life

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cumberbatch-turingThere is one thing that absolutely has to be said about The Imitation Game before we go any further.

ALAN TURING WASN’T IN SCHOOL HOUSE, HE WAS IN WESTCOTT.

There, that’s off my chest. I was carefully watching for any Morse-like wormholes in the heart of Sherborne – the kind of thing whereby Morse can get between any two points in Oxfordshire in two minutes by driving down the High Street. Nothing of that kind was spotted in The Imitation Game; instead we just get a drastic repositioning of everything by about quarter of a mile to the east.

I know, I know, it made cinematic sense – it let them film generally in one central location with a background continuity they wouldn’t have got otherwise. Apart from that key point, is The Imitation Game accurate?

Well, in some ways, goodness knows. I don’t know if its depiction of everyday life at Bletchley is true or not – though as I gather there were several thousand people based at Bletchley at its height, you have to ask where they all were. I don’t know if its depiction of real people is true. I do think it does us all a favour by indicating that Bletchley life may not have been 100% harmonious. With personalities like that, under those stresses, there must have been ego clashes and eruptions, and it does us good to be reminded of it.

It does have to be said that the clashes and eruptions in the movie are fairly standard biopic stuff. Person who is Right is Unappreciated, given an Artificial Deadline, proves he is Right at the last minute. Cue next setback wherein a key problem is solved by an off the cuff remark by an Innocent Stranger. (I find it very hard to believe that they hadn’t already worked out that the German weather reports all ended with the same two words, one of which being “Heil”.) And so on. Meanwhile large chunks of history and the people who made it – Tommy Flowers, the various generations of Colossus – are excised in the name of brevity.

I was particularly irritated by the sequence of events whereby, in the space of one night: they crack Enigma; they work out the disposition of every Allied ship and German U-boat in the Atlantic; they work out that an attack on a convoy is due in about 10 minutes (and one of them has a brother on one of those ships); and Turing takes a stand that no, they Must Not Tell Anyone because then the Germans will know Enigma has been broken. Real life: it wasn’t their job to evaluate or pass judgement on any of their results. Their job was just to produce the results – people much higher up the chain took the decisions on what to do about them.

That said, the moment where the Bombe quietly and without fanfare spits out its first bit of plaintext from a cracked code is very well done – eerie, probably like it will be the first time a genuine AI talks back to someone. And there are many well done moments like that, with good performances by good actors. An especial wave to the set of actors playing the other people in Hut 8, who manage not to be swamped by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Turing is essentially portrayed as a functioning autistic – Sherlock without the innate social skills. Was that accurate? Again, I don’t know. He is depicted as being bullied at school and having serious problems reading social cues. And yet, we know Turing was an excellent runner, and any kind of athlete is going to be accepted to some degree at a place like Sherborne. Trust me on this. We also know – and indeed it’s a key point of his life story – that he had quite some experience in gay cruising, which I would have thought (and I’m speaking purely from theory here) would not be easy if you absolutely couldn’t read any kind of social cue at all. There again, maybe I’m just misjudging the Mancunian gay scene of the early 1950s. Or indeed of any location and period.

All in all, the movie does a good job of depicting (a) just how key the work of Bletchley, Turing and Hut 8 was, and (b) what a massive, massive injustice was done to this civilian war hero, to the point where you’re either welling up or quivering in fury. And it certainly can’t hurt to be reminded that this could happen in the Britain of still just about living memory, together with women not really being able to aspire to anything higher than being a secretary, and healthy teenagers dying suddenly of bovine tuberculosis. It’s well written, well made, well acted and generally fun, so see it if you can.

Travesty! When you lose control and you got no soul, it’s travesty!

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brigThe following contains spoilers for the “Death in Heaven” Doctor Who episode, and before anyone says anything, YES I KNOW IT’S NOT REAL.

But.

Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart was a childhood hero. His character, intended as a one-off in Troughton’s days, had already been popular enough to be dusted off for a second Troughton outing, and then came back again to provide the sole continuity between Troughton and Pertwee Who. Nicholas Courtney played him as courteous, friendly, intelligent, brave, honest, a very good soldier, and fundamentally decent. In fact, as TV father figures go, he was more accessible than the Doctor, being strictly human and of our time. I think part of his popularity was that, like Sarah Jane Smith, you always got the impression that the character was an extension of an equally likeable-in-real-life actor, and like Sarah Jane Smith, I was actually sorry to hear the actor in question had died.

Giving the Brig a daughter to take his place in latterday NuWho was a clever stroke, and Jemma Redgrave convincingly plays the part of a woman who might actually have been brought up by that particular man. She filled a Brigadier-shaped hole in the series.

And that is why it is so unconscionable that they turned him into a cyberman.

A BLOODY CYBERMAN!

And not even handled with any kind of sensitivity, or a way that respects me as a viewer who has tuned in for entertainment, expecting my intelligence to be engaged with and by the plot. It wasn’t “Ooh, this will be a good plot twist”, it was “Wevs, let’s throw in the kitchen sink and make the fans gasp, ‘cos that’s what they do.”

When Jean-Luc Picard was turned into a Borg – back in the days when such procedures weren’t as easily reversible as changing your socks – fandom was riveted to see what would happen next. If there had been a Troughton/Pertwee/Baker era plotline where the Brig met a similar fate, I’m sure it would have had the same effect.

But, this? A 30-second knock-off to justify an utterly disposable line earlier in the episode? If there wasn’t a dry eye in the house it was only because they were tears of rage.

Until yesterday my lasting memory of the Brigadier was of him in a green pullover, lips curled wryly, moustache bristling, probably a pair of binos round his neck, hands on his hips, barking orders like “chap with wings, five rounds rapid”. He was the immovable object that any alien invasion had to get through; and we, the viewers, knew the aliens never would in a million years.

Now, my lasting memory will be of him as a soulless cyborg, a fate that is like re-animating Nelson and conscripting him into the French navy.

How dare they do that to my hero? How dare they?

Future shock

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The global superpower of His Majesty’s Starship was Indian. Most of the future-based scenes from Time’s Chariot were set in an international community in Antarctica, with an international cast, and the hero lived in South Africa. The (very few) Earth-based scenes from Phoenicia’s Worlds took place out at sea or in Kenya/Tanzania. When I have characters that a contemporary audience – you lot – would think of as white(ish) and western, it’s generally because they’re the descendants of the same but no longer living on Earth. I will admit it makes it easier for me as a white guy to write that way, but I also have to find a credible way of getting my future heroes into the story at all.

Because, for a very long time now, I simply haven’t believed that the West as we know it has a future. And here’s a piece that nicely articulates why not: How to Shrink the Economy without Crashing It: A Ten-Point Plan.

It’s not about the actual decline of the West, just a thought experiment as to what needs to happen for our species to survive at anything like its current level of affluence and comfort. And as the author frankly admits, it ain’t gonna happen, because is there a single politician or other power figure that you can imagine actually backing something like this?

… at least, not here in the affluent West with our current system. Other countries may pick it up, gradually, and I can well believe this is what planet Earth could eventually end up with. It’ll be more by accident than by design, but it could happen.

But only after the west has gone the way of Ancient Rome. Sorry to depress you.