r e a l r e v i e w . i e

Season Five, Serial MM, Episode 2

The Tomb Of The Cybermen comes with inevitable folklore. Many early Doctor Who stories are no longer in existence*, and The Tomb of the Cybermen was long thought destroyed in its entirety. It was spoken of with hushed reverence until, in the early 90s, it showed up in Hong Kong. Would it match up to expectations?

Approach this straight after a few Hartnells and you’ll clearly see how much has changed. The Hartnell stories, slow and stodgy as they are, have a sense of exploring possibilities, of unpredictability. Here, we’re on familiar ground from the first few minutes. The Doctor ’n’ pals meet some future-archaeologists** who’ve found the remains of the now-extinct Cybermen. Some members of the expedition are up to no good and so, in Episode Two, the inevitable happens; hitherto in hibernation, the Cybermen awake.

We rarely saw this sort of old-skool B-movie sci-fi under Hartnell. Gerry Davis and Innes Lloyd are in charge now, and their attitude is more formulaic. Tomb opens Season Five, which uses the base-under-siege format in every story but one. It’s supposedly a “classic” era, but some fans now see it as one of the show’s lowest points.

I wouldn’t go that far, and Tomb is entertaining stuff. It’s told with three wonderful sets, all shadows and angles, and the Cybermen’s “tomb” is a hugely impressive four-storey job. There’s a doom-laden atmosphere, with the Cybermen’s awakening rightly famed as an all-time great moment. Episode Two makes it obvious to see whence the story’s reputation came.

The most obvious problem? It’s… well, racist. There’s a huge, brutish hulk of a man who works for the villainess. He’s treated like a child by everyone, and speaks in monosyllabic grunts. He seems to have an obvious intellectual problem but no-one ever says what they are, as if they just expect him to be like this.

Hey, guess which character was played by a black actor?

Deep breath.

Set that aside with a wince, and all’s still not right here. Performances are uneven; the villains redefine one-note; and the dialogue is often atrocious. The biggest issue comes in the subsequent episodes, though – having spent fifty minutes waking the Cybermen up, the script has no idea what to do with them an they end up going back into their tombs. Meanwhile the story degenerates into a creaking exercise where two groups whittle down each others numbers until the good guys inevitably win.

Through it all, Troughton’s Doctor shines. His actions are hard to fathom sometimes*** but his quiet scene with Victoria is lovely. Far more so than Hartnell’s mischievous gentleman, Troughton’s childlike space-tramp set the template for the Doctor’s portrayal by other actors. Frazer Hines provides great support as Jamie, but Victoria is a standard-issue screaming girl and really, really irritating.

Standards and templates are where we’re at. The Cybermen here are impressive-looking bogeymen, nothing more, and stomp around repeating a WE WILL SURVIVE catchphrase; the story, meanwhile, establishes a form of Doctor Who where the Doctor and his good-looking friends meet some expendables and defeat some nasty monsters. That sounds sniffy but it is what a good chunk of the series was about, and the show had to discover this kind of off-the-shelf trope to become the record-breaker it is. This particular outing has dated badly (some of its bedfellows, such as The Ice Warriors, have stood up better) but it’s pulled off with style. It’s enjoyable enough, but not without a twinge of sadness for what Doctor Who has left behind.

Operation “shadow The Guardian’s blog” continues. The next one they’re doing is “stone-cold classic” Tomb Of The Cybermen, otherwise known as “the one that’s OK if you ignore, you know, all the racism.”

Anyway I couldn’t find a decent clip of Episode Six of this week’s fun ‘n’ frolics, so here’s a fan trailer of the opening of Episode One.

Season Two, Serial K, Episode 6: Flashpoint

The Dalek Invasion of Earth is the most famous of all the stories in the series – if you aren’t vaguely aware of a story where the Daleks are seen in Trafalgar Square, you probably don’t know what Daleks are. The media-memory of old-school Doctor Who was (until the New Series, at any rate) that the Daleks invaded more or less every month, but this is the only story where they actually do it*. It marks a subtle shift in the series; the Dalek’s first appearance was a parable about nuclear war and fascism, but this time they’re simply baddies. Doctor Who is about monsters, now.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth is iconic, all right. It’s a combination of elements the seris always threatened to give us, but only ever actually combine here. The Daleks have been ruling Earth for ten years when the story starts; by the end, they’re overthrown and the Doctor’s granddaughter stays behind; in between, there’s a genuine sense of apocalypse. Less than twenty years after World War II, and writers are still thinking about what it’s like to live in a subjugated society. Our Heroes arrive at a silent River Thames, there’s a sign saying “It Is Forbidden To Dump Bodies In The River” and the next five episodes provide black marketeers and starving women who collaborate for food. The Daleks glide around London and have added their own lettering to monuments. It really does feel like Earth has been conquered, and that’s more than you can say for any other episode**.

But watch Episode Six and you’ll quickly see the difficulty. Terry Nation’s fame comes from his brilliant story setups, but he doesn’t build plots at all well. The pace is glacial; the world’s least memorable resistance group spend the story arguing; the Daleks are mining the core of the planet so they can pilot it around the universe, which only makes sense as a mechanism by which they can be defeated; and they’re overthrown when the Doctor tricks their robotised slaves into attacking them, which would be risibly facile even if the Robomen were more threatening than butterscotch pudding. If you show the Daleks ruling Earth for ten years, you’ve got to try a bit harder to defeat the buggers.

The real problem, though, is just that it’s terribly made. People unfamiliar with Hartnell stories assume this is 60s-standard – but watch other stories from this period and you’ll see it isn’t normal to have boom-mikes in shot and cameras missing their marks. The Aztecs, for example, could be part of a different and thoroughly superior programme. Richard Martin’s direction isn’t just flat, it’s incompetent. The Robomen should be terrifying – they’re dead bodies made into soldiers by Dalek technology, basically – but they’re slow, daft-looking, and take ten minutes to complete a sentence. The final battle is the dullest and least convincing “action” sequence ever committed to celluloid.

So this isn’t the classic of repute. It’s padded, shallow, and unconvincing. Dammit, though, the premise makes it – self-evidently – memorable. You can just about enjoy it as B-movie nonsense… but the series was usually – if not always – much, much better than this.

The exception? Susan’s leaving scene. It’s organic, human and very moving. The Doctor’s farewell as he leaves her behind – “Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me I am not mistaken in mine” – is a tender expression of the sadness of parental love. In this, it’s closer to the heart of the series than anything else to be found here.

Some background: The Guardian’s Doctor Who blog has started doing entries on the best episodes of all time. As you might expect it’s plain wrong most of the time, and uninteresting the rest. So I’m shadowing them. This blog will produce 500-600 words on whatever episode they pick, and will be more interesting too.

I mean seriously: the next story they’re talking about is The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Everybody knows that one’s rubbish.

Season One, Serial A, Episode One: An Unearthly Child.

New Series fans viewing Doctor Who in its earliest, monochrome years should prepare for a fairly massive culture shock. Even someone who grew up with (say) Peter Davison, would find William Hartnell’s era a jolt. For someone used to the drive and pace of the post-2005 incarnation, a story from 1963 is barely recognisable.

For most stories of this period, a hefty allowance has to be made for how this programme was made. Episodes were recorded essentially “as live” – location filming was but a pipedream in Doctor Who’s first year – with actors shot by multiple cameras and the director making edits by cutting from one camera to the next. This remained pretty much standard right through Doctor Who’s original run, but in the later stories there was leeway for reshooting and single-camera work. A William Hartnell story is closer to a televised recording of theatre – with some very experimental sound-effects – than anything in contemporary television.

However, An Unearthly Child – Doctor Who’s first ever episode, which kicked off a pretty stodgy four-parter – is a glittering exception. It roars with verve and confidence. The basic plot sounds uninspiring; two schoolteachers follow their strange pupil home, and find themselves in a spaceship which takes off at the episode’s conclusion. However, the way this is presented is spectacular.

It’s important to watch it while remembering certain things. Television then wasn’t trailed, and most people tuning in had no idea what to expect (it seems most expected a medical drama). Even halfway through the episode, there’s little indication this is going to enter the realms of science fiction. We’re learning about a genius schoolgirl, almost entirely unadjusted socially, living with her strange “grandfather.” When Ian and Barbara – the obvious point-of-view characters – finally meet him, he’s high-handed, arrogant, and just wants shot of them. What’s being set up is a psychological drama about a tortured genius.

Instead we wind up in a spaceship that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, accompanied by a man who gives Ian an electric shock for fun, and seems willing to keep two teachers prisoner. Twenty minutes in the average viewer would have no idea where this is going, and you can’t say that about many new series episodes. To a Doctor Who fan looking back, the tension comes from wondering how this fairly unpleasant old guy can possibly end up as the hero.

The production holds up astonishingly well. The title sequence is strange, eerie and unknowable. The actors remember their lines. William Hartnell has astonishing presence. The sets don’t creak and the walls don’t wobble. Uniquely, this episode was reshot (the pilot is still available, and is interesting viewing, although you can see why they reshot it) and perhaps this is why everything is so perfectly honed. The very first shot – a policeman lingers by a junkyard gate, which opens and sees the camera move into a different realm before lingering on a police box – is about things unseen and how one space connects to another. Sound effects (the hum in the TARDIS, the off-kilter music as Susan spouts gibberish in class) play a huge role. Very little 1960s television was as sophisticated as this.

The remaining three episodes disappoint, although they ease the Doctor from nasty-kidnapper to untrustworthy-but-basically-likeable old codger. An Unearthly Child is a league apart. It had a different writer (Anthony Coburn adapted a script by “Bunny” Webber) and huge amounts of effort went into getting the characters right. It remains a masterpiece.

Rhetorical Questions of Irish Politics, No 3,498: Can you imagine if people like the Healy Raes were running the country?

If you cast your mind back a few weeks, you might remember those giddy, halcyon days in which the most notorious news story in Ireland was one of the Healy Rae polyps declaring that people in the country should be given a license to drink and drive. This was widely denounced as ridiculous, and then as the story spread worldwide – largely due to all those people taking to social media to say how stupid it was – it became embarrassing. It was far too easy to imagine the rest of the world looking at a photo of the Healy Rae brood and muttering “Those crazy Paddies, what will they come up with next?” A few days later a report was released which detailed the extent of Ireland’s state-sponsored twentieth century slavery, and the story was swept away by a sudden torrent of perspective. Still, it’s worth dwelling on for a moment.

“On the roads I’m talking about [said Oh Christ Not Another Healy-Rae] you couldn’t do any more than 20 or 30 miles per hour… these people that are being isolated at present, all the wisdom and all the wit and all the culture that they had, the music and the singing, that’s all being lost to the younger generation because these older people might as well be living in Japan and Jerusalem because the younger generation don’t see them at all anymore.”

Just as these are deceptively cogent words beneath an obviously batshit proposal, The Healy Rae gestalt is as comforting as it is embarrassing. It’s uncontroversial to decry the Parish Pump as one of the great sicknesses of Irish political culture – particularly if you live in a parish with lots of working pumps – and Healy Rae is simply the most extreme example. Just by dint of their silly cap and thick Kerry accents, the Healy Raes are easily held at arms length – they’re a bizarre anomaly elected by mad Kerry farmers, a symptom of the localism in Irish politics that’s clearly someone else’s fault. “What do you expect in a country that elects Oh Whatshecalled Healy Rae?” you can say rhetorically, and dismiss the whole political structure as broken by someone else.

However, if you strip away the accent – which, y’know, is how a lot of people in Ireland actually talk – and that registered trademark flat cap, the Healy Raes are terribly conventional politicians. The drink-driving furore was Politicising 101, exactly the sort of move of which any opposition politician in any country would be proud. Many people who read Healy Rae’s words will have habitually driven home at twenty miles an hour after three or four pints, and never had an accident while doing so. Older people are more isolated now than before. Remote rural villages do – or at least did - revolve around the local pub; these pubs attracted people of all ages and social backgrounds, in a rather beautiful way that certainly doesn’t happen in cities and doesn’t entirely happen in small towns. It’s way too neat to say that the erosion of this institution is solely caused by drink-driving legislation (it’s a symptom of a far deeper and more complicated socio-economic change) but drink-driving legislation has certainly had an effect, and it’s perceived by many as gutting pub culture.

The cynicism of Whichever Healy Rae’s motion is that there are many ways of combatting this, and he deliberately suggested one that’s obviously unworkable. Nothing will come of this, but it’s enabled him to hone an image as The Only One Who Understands fighting the good fight against an uncaring government Up In Dublin. He strengthens his position with his core vote, and the ridicule visited upon him just backs up the narrative that his area is neglected and misunderstood. He should be outed as a cynical, manipulative git, but instead he’s dismissed as a culchie moron. He wins.

That’s political smarts, right there.

So when looking at the grim, depressing sight of the Dáil drunkenly passing emergency legislation they had never seen – legislation which crystallises the burden of private debt being assumed by everyone in the country, including the very poorest – the Healy Rae story seems less anomalous. Faced with a leak and the risk of legislation being held up in the courts, the government just decided to pass a bill before anyone would have a chance to stop them. Michael Noonan told the entire country not to get hung up on the details*. The leader of the country – who, pre-election, had promised to renegotiate a debt that he described as an obscenity – tried to pretend it was a victory. The Tánaiste contented himself by shouting insults at Sinn Féin.

Just as the easy response to Healy Rae’s brainfart was to mutter “only in Kerry,” the standard here was to mutter “Only in Ireland.” There was a grim, frightening dimension to the sight of parliamentary democracy being worked out on the back of the envelope by people who’d been dragged out of the pub. The terrible truth is that the only difference between this shambles and normal service was that everyone could see just how half-arsed the semblance of democracy that now runs Ireland has become.

And yet Only In Ireland is as misleading as Only In Kerry.

Some time back, Dan O’Brien wrote an article in the Irish Times where he seriously suggested that the Fiscal Compact would be a good thing because Ireland was completely incapable of running its own affairs and would be better off if Europe did it instead. In fact, he even said “No parliament anywhere in democratic Europe is weaker than the Oireachtas.” This notion, that Ireland’s political structure is uniquely venal and corrupt, is obviously nonsense. This year, a far-right Greek politician hit a female politician in the face on national television. Italy is currently run by an unelected technocrat; before that, it was run by Sylvio Berlusconi. And let’s take the big comparison; by any analysis, the EU reaction to the financial crisis was about as sharp and co-ordinated as twelve baboons on acid trying to explain the plot of Inception by writing it in excrement on the side of the Guggenheim.**

Since the global banking system has gone arse over tip, every single move has been an exercise in plugging holes. The ECB has repeatedly come up with stop-gap solutions – anything at all would do – that will enable the financial system they run to continue unabated. European politicians have argued in small rooms, and Irish leaders have striven to prevent any variation on the debt arrangements as a victory. Referenda have been won on the argument that “the bigger boys will be mad if we say no.” When elections have given the wrong results, countries have been told to try again. And then the Taoiseach has occasionally opined that the financial collapse was down to some weird time when “people just went mad.”

No-one within the political machinery has any interest in trying to construct a fair society. Instead, Men In Suits make as much noise as they can while doing as little as possible; they see a fire, fall over themselves to piss it out, and call this leadership. The Irish government blame Fianna Fáil or the bad boys at the ECB; the ECB wearily tell anyone who questions them that it’s, y’know, fierce complicated altogether.

The aggressively-branded cap and self-image, and the ill-disguised grabs for media attention, have made people like the Healy Raes seem like comedic grotesques in an altogether more serious drama. Look beyond those, you see something different. In their raw self-involvement, in their unbridled cynicism, in their complete lack of interest in how a society is constructed, the Healy Raes are cut from exactly the same cloth as the rest of Europe’s political elites. The question that opened this article is supposed to be a frightening question, but even if you throw it wider and ask what would happen if people like the Healy-Raes ran Europe, the only thing frightening about it is the answer. We don’t have to imagine what it’s like. They already do.

To get started, it’s best to picture a scene. England in the 1970s, where everything that’s not a Life On Mars-approved shade of brown is a gloriously glam-rock purple or strangely bedraggled orange. It’s a very English scene: a patch of grass that’s mostly mud, a gaggle of dirty-faced ten year-olds with a mucky football (you can imagine jumpers for goalposts, if you must, even though everyone knows that goalposts were made from conveniently positioned trees and/or rocks. Jumpers never cut it). In the distance there are scraped-together semi-detached brick houses, just drab enough to be unmistakably council-owned.

And then another boy arrives. The same age, but unmistakably different. His hair is wetted and combed, his face isn’t dirty, his clothes a better cut. The other boys might talk about the merits of Charlie George and T-Rex, but you get the feeling this boy considers such things beneath him. He would probably have a view on hyperinflation and the fallacies of James Callaghan and Harold Wilson, if you asked him.

They stare at each other.

“Hello,” says the new boy. “I’m David.”

The other boys nod, non-committal.

“The pitch is the wrong size,” says David eventually.

“You wot?” asks one of the boys, in the sort of thick cockney normally reserved for children who are described as ‘urchins.’

“Your pitch,” repeats David. “It isn’t the right size and the goals are too small. I was hoping to bring my friends along for a game, but this won’t do at all. I think you’re going have to make some improvements. We’d like to play very much, but it has to be right first.”

And with that he turns and strolls away. Bit of a shame, he thinks, but they need bringing up to speed. Job well done, really.

The other boys watch him go.

“Oo’s that then?” says one.

“Facked if I know,” says the other, and they get back to their game. Occasionally they glance over at the man scrupulously taking notes in the corner, but it’s only Alan Parker, scribbling ‘would work better with Yorkshire accents.’

And so to the present day. There has been much talk in Britland about the meaning of David Cameron’s long-awaited, killingly predictable Euro-speech. It said nothing of importance at all, and yet its reek of post-empire hubris and infused privilege was a study in nationalism and class divides. Effectively, it was a public schoolboy telling bemused kids how to set up the football pitch if they wanted him to play, which is just about the most eloquent statement on right-wing England you can ever hope to see.

The reactions to Cameron’s speech, in fact, told you all you need to know. He was cheered by his party, who basked in the Downton-glow of someone finally sticking it up to Johnny Foreigner, then dreamed of a day when they could recommission Love Thy Neighbour and The Black And White Minstrel Show. Angela Merkel muttered something about compromise, like a parent saying “we’ll see” when their five year-old demands a trip to Disneyland for mid-term break. Francois Hollande’s weary reaction was more along the lines of “no, of course you can’t have any more biscuits,” but the five year-old meme remained.

Pretty much anyone could tell you that you don’t conduct diplomacy by making speeches, you talk to people. This is particularly the case when your last major act was to say “oh, you lot can do what you like” and go to bed while everyone drew up a fiscal compact. Similarly, if you’re going to make an impactful speech, you really need to bother saying which “powers” you want to get back. To those within earshot of Daily Mail-led spoofery, this is the sort of thing you don’t have to specify beyond “bonkers Brussels.” To those outside that little universe, Cameron’s speech was barely coherent.

But that’s the thing about people like David Cameron: they don’t bother with making sure their arguments are coherent, because they don’t see any reason that their arguments should be coherent. What powers, exactly, does he want to get back? He got the opt-out of the fiscal compact he wanted. Most of the well-publicised restrictions on the UK court come from the ECHR, not the EU. He’s muttered about immigration, but knows he can’t go as far as restricting free movement within the EU. And he’s surely aware that bendy-banana regulations are a tabloid fabrication, or else he’s a moron.

And that, ultimately, is where it becomes about class. Just as Cameron says “Well I think people will agree…” with absolute conviction that he’s speaking for the nation, he’s conditioned himself to think he can speak for decent people just because he’s essentially a decent chap. Huge swathes of the Tory party think exactly the same way. People who’ve known defeat, suffering, unemployment and struggle are bitterly aware that the world doesn’t share their views on life; only someone who has never been made to feel small could seriously consider soundbites like “shirkers and strivers” to be a serious comment, while to the rest of us it sounds like a priggish child talking about goodies and baddies.

Given that his words are so vacuous, it’s frighteningly easy to miss the sheer viciousness of Cameron’s intentions. The one power he has clearly specified as wanting to take back from Europe is the Working Time Directive. This is a comparatively modest piece of legislation that writes into law that no-one can work more than 48 hours per week, and must receive eleven hours rest every twenty-four. Is this what’s worth all the grandstanding?

There is much debate about whether it’s acceptable to criticise the upper echelons of the Tory Party as a bunch of toffs, about whether it’s class war or reverse snobbery. All this misses the point. Nobody dislikes Cameron because of his accent, or his clothes, or his upbringing; they criticise him because he behaves like a caricatured snob making ignorant pronouncements on subjects of which he knows nothing. He often seems like a fundamentally well-meaning man – not vindictive like Thatcher, not evangelical like Blair, not bigoted like others in his party – but he gives no indication of understanding a life outside the one in which he grew up. He shows no awareness of struggling, of life without hope, or any sort of society beyond the village green. He talks about “compassionate conservatism,” and leaves a government that treats disabled people like fraudsters – unless they’re above a certain income level, of course.

No, the problem isn’t that he’s a posh-boy, it’s that he acts like one. The outside world heard his petty little speech, and heard half-baked theories and petulant ultimata. Like anyone who lives in a bubble, Cameron is powerless when he leaves it. Not an important voice, not a spokesman for decent people; just a whining, petulant, spoiled teenager who expects an audience whenever he stamps his foot. A fool, in short. Not someone worth listening to at all.

As most right-thinking people in this world will quickly tell you, tea and cafés are a match made in the most putrescent stinking back alleys that serve the kitchens of Hell.

Something terrible has happened to cafés and even (god help us) restaurants when it comes to tea. Most of them don’t know how it works any more. What used to be a perfectly simple transaction – “Would you like something to drink?” “Yes, some tea please,” five minute wait, a pot of tea arrives with milk, sugar and a cup – has increasingly become an obstacle course, where the person who wants the thing has to deal with all sorts of questions that basically insult the drink they choose.

You don’t know more about this drink than us. If you try and make it all clever-clever, we tea-drinkers just think you’re coffee-guzzling ignoramuses. To illustrate I would like to offer you a typical conversation, accompanied by what’s really running through the tea-drinker’s head.

TEA DRINKER: Some tea please.

SERVER: Black tea?

TEA DRINKER:: Yes please.

The Internal Monologue: No, not black tea. Ordinary fucking tea. As in not herbal tea and not green tea, just tea, which is such a standard beverage that asking me to specify it by colour is effectively an affront to civilisation. “Black tea” means “tea without milk,” so you’re getting this wrong from the start. Look, drinking tea is not a fringe thing. Tea is popular. English people like it so much that they enslaved a big chunk of South Asia just to secure a supply of it. If you ask me to elaborate on my request for tea, as if I’m requesting a niche product of which you’re only dimly aware, you’re actively disparaging all those people who suffered under the Raj. You’re being racist, basically.

SERVER: Sure. We have English Breakfast, Earl Grey, and Orange Pekoe.

TEA DRINKER: English Breakfast, please.

The Internal Monologue: OK, let’s get something clear. I know you are just working here. I know you have to ask me these questions. It would probably help our dynamic, though, if you understand that I’m already thinking it’s not his fault it’s not his fault when I look at you.

If I wanted Earl Grey, I would have asked if you had any. Earl Grey is perfectly fine, not my particular tipple, but people who like it understand that they have to ask for it. As for Orange Pekoe… it isn’t even a flavour of tea, for fuck’s sake. It refers to the leaf size, it’s got nothing to do with the flavour, which you should really be able to guess since it doesn’t actually taste of oranges. I might as well go into a car dealership, ask what kind of cars they have, and get the answer “we have Fords, Toyotas, and red ones.” Orange Pekoe could be Assam, it could be Darjeeling, it could be anything. If you’re going to call it anything, call it “plain.” I don’t even want English Breakfast, frankly, but I’m not supporting your total ignorance of the product you sell by asking for the one you got so heinously wrong. Our relationship is ruined and I hate this place.

Five minutes later the tea arrives in the form of a cup with hot water in it, a small tea-bag on the side, some milk and sugar.

TEA DRINKER: Thank you.

The Internal Monologue: What the fuck is this? Seriously, what the fuck have you just brought me? If I ask you for tea I want tea, not the constituent ingredients. If I asked you for a toasted cheese sandwich, would you bring me some bread, some cheese and a Breville? No you bloody wouldn’t. I don’t want to assemble my tea at the table, particularly since you haven’t even brought me a teapot. When a three year-old plays with their tea set they’re closer to the correct preparation than you are right now.

For a start, the milk is supposed to go in first. How am I supposed to put the milk in first if you bring me a cup full of water? Where am I supposed to put the bag when I’m done with it? Where’s my pot of hot water to top myself up? I mean, you might as well go the whole hog and bring it to me in a shot-glass. I was braced for my tea being shit anyway, but now you’ve even ruined that. What the actual fucking fuck?

Oh, and it’s a tea bag. It’s not even air-sealed. OK, I can live with a bag, but why go through that rigmarole of offering me different flavours and then bring me my tea in a bag? If you’re going to pretend to be all high-class, then I want leaves and a tea-strainer, for pity’s sake. Go away immediately and set fire to this place.

The reason for this horror, basically, is coffee. There are now approximately 37,569 different variations on coffee available at any coffee-shop, most of which are designed to make “brown muck that tastes one-thirtieth as good as it smells” seem challenging and sophisticated. For some reason, “Americano” is now an acceptable phrase, as opposed to just a pointlessly elaborate way of asking for a coffee without all that other shit in it, and that’s yet another reason to hate Starbucks.

Somewhere along the line, establishments looked at tea and decided it needed to catch up. “We must make it complex,” they muttered. “We must offer more choice.” But here’s the central problem: tea drinkers can already make exactly what they want at home. It’s difficult to make yourself a nice latté, or a decent frappamoccachoccacino or whatever they’re called, because you need some pretty substantial hardware to do That Thing With The Milk. Coffee-drinkers are slaves to this retail tyranny: they have to go to cafés and sniff it out, find somewhere that offers what they want.

Tea-drinkers don’t. You, dear café, are only offering us a vague approximation of Our Favourite Cup Of Tea, because social etiquette has deemed that we can’t nip home and put the kettle on. Nor can we just bring tea with us in a canister and ask for a pot of hot water and a cup, although this would make the world a better place. We’re getting an inferior product, we know it, and we’re content with this.

What we’re not content with is having shite served to us by people who pretend to be experts on the subject. Give it up and be humble. Put a bag in a pot and serve it apologetically. We will take it and drink it and not be offended. That is the most you will ever get out of this relationship.

Nobody seems to know how to talk about the internet and social media without promptly lapsing into stupidity. And yes, the first person to comment “your  first point is proved by your subsequent ones” wins my respect.

For example, the recent decision of Irish newspapers to argue that links to their pages are copyrightable – followed by a rather undignified climbdown from their initial position of “we’ll charge you for linking” – was just a surprisingly stupid position to take. The idea that a link is copyrightable is bonkers, a notion that doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny at all. A plain text link is surely acceptable – if not, then footnotes in essays are equally violate – and the difference between that and a hyperlink is so small that we aren’t so much splitting hairs as preparing Chromosomes Julienne.

Yet the whole silly affair, and the utterly ludicrous position held by the NNI, have been allowed to tarnish the whole argument. The effects of “free” content on the internet has been, quite obviously, corrosive to newspapers and to journalism. Commercial news aggregators are a quite serious affront to the whole concept of copyrighted material. There’s an important discussion to be had about how to fund and protect the press, but if they continue to respond in such a stupid way it won’t ever happen. No-one will engage with someone who shows themselves to be moronic with their first sentence.

And so to the latest meme of cyber-bullying, and the clear problem; anyone who refers non-ironically to cyber-bullying has demonstrated idiocy from the start. No, worse than that; they’ve demonstrated that they see the internet as something other, a frightening realm they don’t really understand.

Or perhaps they’re simply trying to portray it as such. There has been a quiet, gnawing cynicism in the way that various establishment figures have tried to generate a cyber-bullying panic, chiefly among people who don’t really know how the internet works. Recently, the Irish Independent claimed that a fairly routine defamation case was about to cause “panic” across Twitter, as if the entirety of people using the medium were completely unaware that libel is illegal. Meanwhile, “writers” like J**n Fucking W*t*rs and David Adams have been portraying the internet as some sort of cesspool of vitriol and abuse, lead by a masked cabal of anonymous lunatics with the bile of a whale-liver and the collective IQ of a scrotum.

A large chunk of this can be ascribed just to willful ignorance. Like most people who decry the power of That Tinternet, Adams and Waters wear their utter ignorance of it as a badge of pride. Twitter is habitually compared to other forms of written communication, but it works on a level more akin to a pub conversation than written communication. Since people like David Quinn use this public forum specifically to spread their own opinions, it’s a bit rich to be shocked when some people push back. Twitter, Facebook and their ilk are effectively the internet’s public square; if you start shouting your own views through a megaphone, you wouldn’t be overly surprised to have an egg or two thrown your way. Perhaps the real change is that the establishment are now hearing the thoughts from people that would previously have been muttered into a newspaper article.

Other criticisms of That Tinternet are pickled in a patriarchal notion of establishment journalistic superiority, a thinly-disguised seam of “Don’t you know who I am?” lying beneath the ludicrous rhetoric. The recurring theme is of journalists hounded by the mob, which is breathtakingly daft when one considers the privileged platform that people like John Waters are given.  Compared to the response you’d get if you went and yelled some repugnant, unsustainable and badly thought-out reactionary bilge to people on the street, comments threads on news sites are astonishingly polite; complaining about “the cloak of anonymity” is ridiculous when one examines the power-dynamics. Also, since Waters writes columns designed to provoke, his indignation at the rough-and-tumble of responses is doubly pathetic. He, and many writers in his position, appear to have entirely forgotten that people pay to read these opinions – either by buying a newspaper, or allowing websites to shove adverts at them – and have a perfect right to say they find them ill-informed, unpleasant, inconsiderate or plain vulgar.

In other words, what we’re talking about is a defence of privilege. It seems absurd that national politicians would go out of their way to stop people being rude about them on the internet, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the vindictive pettiness of power. Politicians are happy to say they “understand” public anger as they destroy lives, condemn families to abject poverty, and desecrate and brutalise society in order to hand out billions to unsecured bondholders… and then they are scandalised if a random blogger calls Enda Kenny a cunt. It’s obviously unpleasant for a politician to read that someone hopes they die of cancer – but it’s not that surprising if you’re part of a government who are making it more likely that ordinary people will die of cancer, particularly if you claim to understand public anger. This isn’t saying such messages are at all acceptable, but it’s important to place them in context.

It might seem absurd to suggest that controls on internet access are being mooted simply to stop impudence, but even if the paintings-of-Cowen affair is accepted as being another era, we shouldn’t forget the government’s insistence on removing some campers from the Central Bank in time for Paddy’s Day. Politicians are waving an internet bogeyman at the world and co-opting terrible, tragic deaths to do so – including, astonishingly the appalling death of one of their own colleagues. Irish newspapers, terrified of what the internet is doing to their business model, appear happy to join in.

Decorum is, ultimately, a very beautiful thing and it needs protection. This concept of manners – the very idea that humanity can listen to widely differing opinions without recoursing to abuse, or punching Kelvin MacKenzie’s face in – is a staggering social achievement of the modern age; it’s what stops us from burning heretics, or looking for reds under the bed. However, just as power operates by controlling the form of discourse and decreeing where it can happen, a decorum imposed from above is hegemony and nothing more. Waving concepts like “anonymity” as a blanket evil is just preserving an abstract notion of how things should be, where hateful Myers-esque rubbish is entirely admissible once someone puts a name to it, and the quiet trading of consumer data on individuals by internet-based companies is Just The Way It Is and something to which all people should submit.

And the real sadness of this? At the core of the whole tired shitstorm are lives lost and destroyed, genuine pain and fear and sadness. Bullying through the internet is as real, live an issue as it is in other spheres of life. That social media presents a whole new vein of bullying is undeniable – bullying is a blanket social phenomenon, and it would be a miracle if it wasn’t as prevalent on the internet as elsewhere. Nor is this the same as schoolyard or workplace bullying; it can involve larger groups of people, it’s more difficult to escape, and the medium enables aggressors to distance themselves from their actions and their victims. Perhaps most importantly of all, it’s an environment that many people don’t really understand. People might say that “the internet doesn’t bully people, people bully people,” but this is as ill-thought out as its counterpart slogan about guns. The conversation does need to happen, but not like this.

Mass behaviour is a big, complex subject: arriving at a new, sustainable social etiquette for online communication is a spectacularly difficult thing. It’s certainly not going to be arrived by an infrequent blogger pissing his opinions in a quiet alley of the internet – but it’s even less likely to be resolved by portraying the internet as a seething den inhabited by devils (sorry, that should probably be Cyber-Devils). If one side of the argument continues to purvey cynical, po-faced ignorance as “legitimate concern,” then the other side never have to examine their behaviour at all. As slogans get louder, the debate gets more pointless and tedious and reductive, and the less likely anything is to ever change.

In the wake of Savita Halappanavar’s sickening, horrible death, the sudden vocalism of the anti-choice movement has been just spectacularly crass. It’s a time when you might think these people would keep their opinions to themselves, just for a little while; not out of a politically-driven sense of expediency, but out of a basic sense of decency and manners. David Quinn and his ilk probably think they’re in some way brave for issuing their piety-coated “calm down dear” to a revulsed populace; in fact, their articles read as a cheap, Jan Moir-inspired crassness and spite. If there’s anything positive to be taken from their nastiness, it’s that it does at least show up how vulgar the anti-choice movement can be.

The most common catcall has been that this tragedy shouldn’t become a political football; that it shouldn’t be “politicised,” if such an ugly word can be said to exist. It’s breathtaking to suggest that a death so rooted in a profoundly political malaise shouldn’t be seen in terms of politics. As she lay in agony, Savita Halappanavar cried out “I am neither Irish nor a Catholic.” This is a viscerally political horror.

I’ve read several articles today strenuously pointing out that all the facts are not yet known; even some instances, casting doubt on whether Savita Halappanavar’s death was related to her being denied a termination at all.

It’s true that there are some things which are not yet known. Some things the general public, and Savita’s friends and family, will never know.

It will never be known, for example, what went through her mind as she lay in agony for almost three days, trying to process the inevitable forthcoming death of her unborn child, the prospect of her own death thickening around her, her thoughts all the while being buffeted by physical agony. The howling of grief and terror and pain echoing through her still-open body.

One of the most enduring and comforting of concepts is the idea of being “ready” to die. With death inevitable, it’s all any of us can hope for – that when we die we might be in some way prepared. Some people are just that; so many others are not. The yawning horror of a slow, terrified death is the sort of thing often described as “beyond imagining,” when in fact it’s almost too easy to imagine. The notion that people don’t die when they are ready; that they die desperate, alone, stricken by pain, and still clinging on.

It isn’t “politicising” to look at the fate of Savita Halappanavar – in an adopted home thousands of miles from her family, the future of her unborn child torn from her, seeing strangers tell her that her life could be saved but they weren’t yet permitted to do so, listening to her begging for the ordeal to be brought to “an end” – not that such an ordeal would ever have ended, had she lived – and imagine what she thought of the country. To speculate on the hundreds of ways that this woman, so stripped of her dignity, must have asked herself “Why is this country doing this to me?”

Nor is it politicising to say that for a state to do something so blankly viciously, so impassively cruel, is an abomination.

We might ask if this would have happened to an Irish person, or even a non-white person. It isn’t entirely clear that the hospital’s claim that there was nothing they could do – even the shocking line that “this is a Catholic country” – was accurate, and the Medical Council’s guidance on the matter is far from clear. And yet ultimately, this comes back to the same fact; the torture and death of a young woman came about because of a callous, self-preserving establishment who have systemically ignored the Irish people’s wishes.

The Irish people have been asked this question twice. In 1992 the post-X Case amendment proposed an amendment to the constitution prohibiting suicide as a grounds for termination, and it was defeated. In 2002 the same question was asked in more detail, and again it was defeated. And yet the X Case remains unlegislated-for, as TDs have retreated from confronting the poster-brandishing, slogan-yelling hysteria of the anti-choice mob who are now lecturing people on the need for calm. The law in this matter is far from clear, and it’s still not certain whether this is a failure of law or a case of maplractice. Yet either way, it remains a failure of legislation; it’s exactly that lack of clarity is exactly what allowed a hospital to make the decision they did.

Ireland’s attitudes on abortion are drenched in a quiet hypocrisy. 1992 tacitly formalised a situation where Irish people could get abortions by right – so long as they were prepared to endure the lonely journey across the Irish sea, and cope afterwards in a cheap hotel room where they could remain safely unseen. After the X Case, there has never been a serious suggestion that there should be a national conversation about when people from Ireland truly believe that abortion is right or wrong.

And so the law governing abortion in Ireland is still the Offences Against The Person Act of 1861. Other matters this law covers failing to properly clothe one’s servants, and obstructing the sale of grain.

The rallying cry is that Savita Halappanavar’s death should not be in vain. It’s tempting to think she might have hoped for this, as she died; that she might think her torment would make a society see the belchingly ugly blisters on its conscience and decide this cruelty couldn’t be tolerated any longer.

Who are we kidding? All she can have thought, as she died, was of the myriad different shafts of anguish lancing through her. Just pain, nothing but pain. The rest – the hope, the atonement, the stop-this-now – will never be enough. Still, it’s something, and it’s up to us.

It’s remarkable how quickly the term “paedophile” has become attached to Jimmy Savile. It’s certainly not incorrect, given that there are reports of Savile molesting girls as young as eight. And given the (completely appalling) trail of wreckage that has emerged following in Savile’s wake, it seems questionable to start splitting hairs. But…

Of Savile’s (apparently) hundreds of victims, the overwhelming majority of them are teenage girls. This simply isn’t paedophilia, which is a disorder where someone’s primary or exclusive sexual attraction is to prepubescent children. It isn’t in any way an apologia for Jimmy Savile to say he doesn’t appear to have been a paedophile. He might well have been a hebephile; he might just have been a thoroughly nasty piece of work who used his position to get sexual kicks out of pretty much anyone over whom he could wield power. What he was, we now know,was an utterly repugnant serial sex abuser and mutliple, systemic rapist.

Whether the application of the correct definition really matters is a reasonable question, and saying “actually, raping a fourteen year-old isn’t technically paedophilia” does rather smack of interrupting a discussion of the civil unrest in Libya to argue about the spelling of Ghadaffi. And yet… on Question Time last Thursday, Shirley Williams spoke at length about how authority doesn’t listen to “kids.” But (as I wrote here quite recently) the institutional angle of the Savile affair is at least as rooted in misogyny as it is in attitudes to children, and the overwhelming majority of these cases are specifically about girls not being listened to. Many adult women have also come forward to talk of tales of unwanted BBC gropings. Make it solely about children, and you just simplify the argument.

The problem with talking about “children” in this way is that they become idealised, implicate humans; they’re seen as dewy-eyed symbols of innocence as much as they are real human beings. The outcome of this is that if a child doesn’t fit that image, people can begin to exclude them from the definition.

Example? Well, the staggering cognitive dissonance of The Daily Mail has been pointed out in this way on several occasions: on one hand screaming about the paedophiles who stalk Britain’s little children, while happily drooling over pictures of 14 year-old girls on its website. And yet the Mail (if it were a single entity) would probably see little contradiction at all. When the Mail talks about children it speaks of innocents, but when a 14 year-old wears a miniskirt, or behaves in what they categorise a “sexualised” manner, she is no longer a child in the terms they have defined.

What makes this doubly ugly is that it is, almost certainly, exactly the logic that creatures like Savile used. Oh, she’s ready to be educated. The girl’s ready to be a woman. She knows what she’s doing, dressing like that. She’s a dirty one, she just doesn’t know it yet. And so on, the misogynists and rapist’s charter, slightly modified (and it only has to be slightly modified) to fit a particularly unprotected and vulnerable group of young women.

This treatment of children as a walled-off phenomenon is sometimes perfectly sensible from a pragmatic point of view, but it’s not always helpful. Childre are ultimately just another group of people, and the notion that they should be governed by their own rules leads to some strange, hurtful outcomes. Children undergoing bullying are regularly asked to laugh off the sort of treatment from their peers that would simply be criminal harassment or assault were it visited on an adult, for example. This doesn’t mean that children should be treated identically to the average adult, of course – we treat all people according to their own abilities and backgrounds, which is why we don’t expect senile people to get a job. But the notion that children are something other is not a particularly sound one.

Today, Ireland is voting in “the Children’s Referendum,” and a strange one it is too. Essentially it rewrites the constitution to codify children’s rights. As a response to the revelations of the last few years about the treatment some children have endured at the hands of the state, this is – in isolation – a fundamentally decent statement of priorities. There’s nothing in the new text which is particularly worrying, and it’s difficult to understand why anyone would raise a sufficient objection to vote the thing down. That’s even before you remember that voting No means you wind up on the same side as John fucking Waters.

Yet the rhetoric around the referendum is… telling. There has been a lot of talk about putting children front-and-centre of the constitution, and emotive recounting of the way children were treated in the past. However, children already have rights in Ireland, as guaranteed by Article 40; they have exactly the same rights as every other citizen in the state.

The abuses of Industrial Schools and the Magdalene Laundries and by the Catholic Church and oh so many more… these were nothing to do with the constitution.

They were entirely illegal.

They were crimes.

They happened because of the cultural dominance of the Church, the complicity of the State, the heavy patriarchy of Irish society, and a seldom-discussed dose of toxic class politics.

They happened because the state ignored the rights of its citizens and didn’t give a shit about enforcing its laws to protect a certain section of society.

If we’re putting children front-and-centre… what has happened in Ireland over the last few years, exactly?

The last few years have seen cuts to Special Needs Allowances. And Child Benefit. And Education. And Language Support. And countless community schemes which specifically benefited young  people. Like every other disempowered section of Irish society, children have been repeatedly attacked by the Irish state. Against this backdrop, talk about safeguarding the nation’s youth is as vacant as a ghost estate.

Even the common-or-garden anti-welfare pub-myths, beloved of tabloid press and barstool boors, habitually attack children. Take the standard-issue complaint about “girls deliberately getting pregnant so they can get a council house” as a case in point: even if one girl in a hundred does deliberately do this, you still have to ask yourself what happens if such a person doesn’t get a council house. Any alternative simply harms or disadvantages her child. The child about whom Ireland cares so much.

Cast against this backdrop, the Children’s Referendum reads quite differently. It’s a hypocritical, cynical and cosmetic measure, intended to suggest this government values children when their actions suggest they do no such thing. Introducing Ireland’s past into the debate is a rather empty and cynical ploy. It’s true that this is very much a statement of intent, but without meaningful actions to back them up these statements are simply duplicitous. It couldn’t be any more distasteful if they somehow got the constitution to feature Whitney Houston singing The Greatest Love Of All.

None of which actually justifies a “No” vote. I’ve read many reasons for voting “No,” but all of them seem every bit as entrenched in symbolism (or conspiracy-theory stories) as the yes campaign. However, as I write this, turnout for the referendum would seem on course to be extraordinarily low. Apathy gets a bad name, on occasion. Perhaps, just perhaps, the majority of the Irish electorate recognise this referendum for exactly the empty gesturing it so clearly is.

Now that George Lucas has roundly flogged it off, it’s a good time to talk about Star Wars.

An awful lot of cock gets talked about Star Wars, most of it derogatory. Since the 1999 explosion of Phantom-Menace-Is-The-Worst-Thing-Ever culminated in the general dismissal of Revenge of the Sith, much of that talk is sneering and dismissive. In a strange reversal of fortune from when I were a lad and we all ate coal for breakfast, it’s now much cooler to like Doctor Who than it is to like Star Wars. Obviously it’s absurd to try and encapsulate what everybody thinks about a film series – opinions always vary – but the interquartile range of Star Wars opinions probably lies between two narratives: one is that the prequels represent a naked betrayal of the first three films to commercialism, basically the Ewoks writ large; the other is that Star Wars was always a silly series of films, ludicrously overrated over the years, and the prequels were naked cash-in efforts whose crime was to be even worse than the first three.

Through it all, there’s a third truism. George Lucas is now (or was always) a money-grabbing shit who only wants to steal cash from his loyal, shat-upon fanbase. The recent release of a horrible 3-D Phantom Menace, and Yoda popping up in a Vodafone ad, are the actions of someone wringing every last possible bit of money from a franchise has systemically betrayed its fans.

So to get a view that might just be a bit more balanced – that might just, say, explain why hundreds of millions of children adored Star Wars – let’s look at George Lucas.

Having seen him interviewed several times, Lucas is impossibly charming and unpretentious. He’s also transparently a nerd, someone who grew up on Saturday morning cinema and understands populist film-making as well as anybody. Hearing George Lucas talk about other people’s films is to hear someone who knows and loves cinema*. While he isn’t – and never was – a very good director, George Lucas understands how and why films work. He understands their relationship with their audience, not in the marketing-lead demographic-speak of today, but in a deeply personal sense. Star Wars has had an enormous effect on children because Lucas knew what it was for, better than anyone. His critics (and many of his fans) have always been out of step with why Star Wars and the genius of the man who created it.

Many years ago, Mark Kermode made the following statement: “George Lucas cannot write. His writing skills are not even pre-school.”**

Let’s start there, shall we?

Even if you allow for comic exaggeration and substitute “fifteen year-old” for “pre-school,” this statement is bilge. The construction of Star Wars is intricate and beautiful, driven by a dynamic structure that throws open the scale of the story the further we progress into the film. It’s sufficiently well-written that the exploits of two robots manage to remain entertaining for most of the first act, and structured oddly enough that we don’t even meet the protagonist until nearly half and hour in. What starts as a dogfight between two spaceships, and then gets even smaller as it relocates itself to a farm on a backwater planet, acquires a truly galactic scale through the use of a quest narrative. The notion that a story so tight, so well-controlled and yet having such a vast scale, is badly-written…? Ridiculous.

Yet there’s more to it than that. As a child, watching Star Wars around Christmas time (I was just too young to see the films in the cinema on their original release, although I do remember going to a showing of all three – dressed as an X-Wing pilot – a couple of years after Return of the Jedi came out), the fascination of the story started with something that nobody has achieved before or since: this was a film for children that felt tremendously adult.

Which is to say it exclusively featured adults, but the adults were driven by motivations that children could recognise. Almost every single children’s film features a child as the lead character, but Star Wars gave us grown-ups; and yet , brilliantly, it portrayed them from a child’s point of view. It understood that children don’t actually see themselves saving the world when they’re eight years old; kids are acutely aware of their own helplessness, and they know it’s grownups who get things done. But here were grownups you felt you understood, felt you would become. Here was a world you could exist in.

And what a world. Anyone who thinks George Lucas is a cynic doesn’t pay attention to the fantastic detail embroidered into his films. Worlds like Tatooine have an obvious, tangible existence off the edges of the screen. This is done through obsessively cohesive detail in every facet of the production. When Uncle Owen declares “I need a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators,” it’s dismissed as technobabble. But what does that line tell us? “Droid,” as a contraction, tells us that androids are commonplace hardware in a lived-in future. “Moisture vaporators” are entirely consistent with the world we see: the construction of the phrase suggests moisture being condensed from the atmosphere. “Binary language,” meanwhile, gives us a world where machines talk to each other. Other films made up sciencey language that sounded good; in Star Wars, these lines contributed to the dynamic of the universe.

The design was a key part of this, too, and children instinctively understood the nature of each location from how they looked: witness the greys, blacks and harsh lines of the Death Star, an entirely man-made environment which is imagined as a nightmarish authority-bound place where navigation is impossible and you can’t be in the corridor without a reason. The Death Star is a child’s nightmare of a school more than anything else.

Once you see the film this way, as a network of fascinating story-environments connected by a fairly standardised plot, then it’s obvious that Star Wars is the best of the original trilogy and you can stick The Empire Strikes Back up your jacksy. Not that Empire is bad; Hoth and Bestine and Dagobah are all fascinating, although they’re all more obviously one-liners than Tatooine. Empire has also been immeasurably improved by the digital retrofitting, which turns all the tedious running-around corridors at the end into tantalising glimpses of the city in the clouds.***

The prequels, then, work in exactly the same way. They are primarily about the places and the links between them. The first two have obvious problems. The Phantom Menace is a mess for the first half-hour, settles down on Tatooine, and then falls apart again at the end. By actually including a kid, it suggests that George Lucas has forgotten what he did right in the original trilogy. Oh, and even kids didn’t really like Jar-Jar, they just loved the universe and wanted to like Jar-Jar. As for the second… much of it’s good clean fun but the narrative’s not straightforward, the ending is risible and no-one ever managed to explain where those insects all came from. Finally, both films have far too many scenes where characters sit around explaining the plot, and the underdirected performances are… variable.

Revenge of the Sith, though…

Far, far too many people are pretending that Revenge of the Sith isn’t a squarely gorgeous film from beginning to end, and for the sake of the world in general it has to stop immediately. Smug sneering at a film as expansive, as confident and as brimming with verve as Revenge of the Sith – from a culture that simultaneously lionised the narcissistic-as-fuck “men in sunglasses and leather coats” aesthetic of The Matrix, and the tediously predictable machismo of Peter Jackson’s clunking computer-game travesty of Lord of the Rings – is… well, if not outright stupid, it’s unbecoming.****

Revenge of the Sith has maybe a dozen scenes where the dialogue clunks and the joins show. None of them matter. The same banal dribblers who like Battlestar Galactica and think “dark” is a synonym for “good” ridiculed the film because Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader happened over him fancying a girl. In so doing they showed themselves up as bereft, because watch it through the eyes of a twelve year-old and it’s obvious: when you’re twelve, being told what to do by your parents (and the Jedi are basically parents) for no good reason is exactly what tyranny is. Anakin is an adult in love, yet he still can’t be with who he wants. That is the worst thing imaginable when you’re twelve. And the pressure of being a golden child, burdened by expectation from above – yeah, children get that too. At the time, other films for children became obsessed with post-modernism, and Shrek and its ilk busied themselves making knowing winks to grownups over their core audience’s heads. Monsters Inc thought it was hilarious to have mythological creatures with office jobs, for crying out loud. And then there was Star Wars, the only thing that still made self-sustaining, dynamic worlds for children on their terms. If the grasp of the dramatic in those films often failed – and to be clear, in Revenge of the Sith it really doesn’t – the world-building didn’t. You understand the architecture and the relationships underpinning worlds like Naboo and Coruscant. You knew those places, just like you knew Tatooine.

And thanks to the oft-decried merchandising – or to put it another way the toys, the action figures available at pocket-money prices which enabled children to build their own worlds and stories within the universe Lucas created, to superimpose their own motivations onto the two-dimensional icons Lucas gave us – you could exist in them. You could thrive and create and get smarter.

So if you want to see the 3-D rerelease and the selling off to Disney as anything, it’s the tired actions of a man who created something flawed but beautiful and got repeatedly sneered at for it. Not just by cynical arsewits who never engaged with his universe, but by all-growed-up fans of the original trilogy who decided Han Solo was the point of the whole thing, and trashed the prequels for not being all adult and serious like Babylon 5. Forgetting that they loved the films because they were for children, and that when they played at Star Wars they always wanted to be Luke.

It’s not like Lucas was likely to do anything else. Even if he now has more money than god, I don’t begrudge him a penny. I’m saddened to see the trilogy go to Disney because only George Lucas really understood the Star Wars universe and how it related to children, but I don’t blame him for getting shot of a franchise that it’s fashionable to dismiss. The prequels didn’t piss all over his legacy, they were cronky and flawed and brash and vivid and loved by their target audience.

And while Disney has made many films, but the chances of them understanding that dynamic are close to nil. Star Wars VII will almost certainly destroy the other six, and will almost certainly be better-reviewed than any of the other films. So it goes.

Well, I just want to say thank you to George Lucas. He made my life so much better. And I’m grateful. That’s all.