…and it seemed like a weirdly appropriate film to be watching.
I love that movie and I especially love that it’s played so straight. Whole segments of dialogue are lifted from the book and said by Muppets and it works! Scenes of sincere and saddening human emotion are acted out by Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy and I never doubt it all for a minute. Honest to god, I think Charles Dickens, once someone had explained to him what a Muppet was, would have loved Muppet Christmas Carol.
Anyway. At the end of the movie Gonzo very wisely suggests the audience read the book. So, with less than a hour to go before the election results start coming in, here’s a significant bit from the book that didn’t make it into the movie (although I’m sure the Muppet performers would have done a good job with it.)
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
He just doesn’t care. pic.twitter.com/BMryupJU5V — Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 9, 2019 Boris Johnson has been accused of being “heartless” after refusing to look at a photo of a child sleeping on a hospital floor because of a lack of beds. The Prime Minister was asked about the incident at Leeds General Infirmary, but rather […]
Even apart from, you know everything else about this, Boris Johnson apparently thinks he’s entitled to steal people’s phones. That is a thing Boris does.
This afternoon I saw on the news that shots had been fired at London Bridge. This immediately set alarm bells ringing. (The last terrorist attack there, I was in the area just the day before.) And it was worse because my brother lives in London, albeit not near any of the landmarks. So reading through the news stories as they came out took up most of my day. At first I thought no-one had died except the attacker, but now the death toll is two innocent people, and that really sucks.
I would also recommend never, ever following developing news stories on Twitter.
British-based exhibition chain Vue has pulled gang film “Blue Story” from its theaters after a brawl among dozens of moviegoers – some of them apparently wielding machetes – erupted at a cinema in central England. The fight broke out late Saturday afternoon during a screening of the film at a multiplex in Birmingham, Britain’s second-most-populous […]
This is a completely unfathomable decision, not least because – as far as I can acertain from the local news that was just on – the screening the machete-wielding people were attending was not actually Blue Story (and might have been Frozen II); the majority of culprits were young teens (and wouldn’t have been legally allowed into Blue Story) and, you know, Vue has so far refused to issue a statement about any of this so unless you were there you’re probably in the dark. And also, a quick look at #BoycottVue and you’ll get people explaining the racial factor. Which I agree with, because back in 2012 I didn’t see cinemas banning The Dark Knight Rises after people actually died.
I consider watching The Crown to be a guilty pleasure more than anything else. I know these people generally aren’t good people, and the institution that protects them is even worse. (Please someone put Prince Andrew in prison already.) So I don’t really watch it to feel emotion, just to marvel at the costumes and cinematography and occasionally learn something new about recent history.
“Aberfan” was different, though. I already knew the basics about the Aberfan disaster, how it could easily have been prevented and how most of the victims were young children. But that didn’t prepare me for how it’s all portrayed in this episode. You get to know the kids and their parents a little bit before the opening credits and then fifteen minutes later the adults are frantically digging through rubble with their bare hands to find their children. Most don’t succeed.
116 children altogether died at Aberfan. It wasn’t thatlong ago, 1966, and there are still survivors alive. Some of them consulted with Netflix on this episode, which was absolutely the right thing for Netflix to do when releasing an episode about something like this. There’s an article about it from the Radio Times here which has some words from the survivors and it also mentions how Netflix provided a psychologist for them. That’s good too.
This is a stunning episode of television. It’s beautifully shot. All through it you feel like an outsider observing terrible grief from a safe distance, which is exactly what the Queen does in this episode.
The bosses who allowed the accident to happen are given no sympathy here, none whatsoever. The episode also kept in the most famous quote regarding the tragedy –
The brave front of the people of Aberfan cracked on Monday at an inquest on 30 of the children.
There were shouts of “murderers” as the Coroner of Merthyr, Mr. Ben Hamilton, began reading out the names of the dead children.
As one name was read out and the cause of death given as asphyxia and multiple injuries, the father of the child said “No, sir, buried alive by the National Coal Board”.
I don’t know the name of the person who said that either in real life or in the show, but it’s in there.
All in all this feels like a respectful treatment of a terrible event, but at the same time… I wish it hadn’t all been squished around a plot about the Queen trying to explore her emotions. In terms of The Crown itself it’s good character development and all but I kinda feel like something like Aberfan is bigger than one episode of a TV show. It’s good in terms of getting the story out there, because I’m pretty sure the disaster is completely unknown of outside the UK, but I wish it hadn’t taken a million-dollar high-profile show like The Crown to get to tell the story, you know? We should have talked about the tragedy more without having to drag the Queen, who was barely involved, into things to make it more interesting/marketable/what have you.
I have really mixed feelings about all of this, you can probably tell. But I was sad watching it, and I did cry. Partly because I feel like, you know, a few more seasons to go and The Crown can do an episode about Grenfell, and by the time that happens there’ll probably have been at least one more preventable disaster caused by faceless corporations, and then there’ll be another one after that and after that and after that, long after the Queen is dead and The Crown is done.
This does of course make perfect sense! Prince Andrew is a creepy old man who was friends with Epstein and even as we speak there are rumors that he’s trying desperately to quash any news about potential rape cases.
Meghan, on the other hand? Meghan is a BLACK FEMINIST.
Sigh. (Don’t read the Express, it’s trash. So’s this country sometimes.)
My dad had to go on benefits after he lost his job. He was the almost full-time carer for my mother at that point. Also at that point, there were places he wouldn’t have been allowed to rent. There were people who would have called him and mum a drain on society.
A “gay giraffe row” has reportedly split senior Labour figures, after Dawn Butler MP defended LGBT+ inclusive education in schools by using the example of gay giraffes. Butler, Labour’s shadow women and equalities secretary, said that people think children can be “taught to be gay” but that “giraffes are gay… you cannot teach it”. “If…
I’m sorry, what? Is that some sort of bizarre continuation of that scene from Gladiator?
(Shout out to Omid Djalili there.)
This is not even the most ridiculous thing happening in Britain right now, I’m sure you’ve heard the Brexit news. All I know at the moment is that the modern-day UK does not seem like a safe place to be… well, to be anything except the same demographic as those in power, it would appear. And the ‘LGB Alliance’ thing has got me utterly despairing.
Hey, Donald Trump got loudly booed last night I hear. Maybe we ought to finally start doing the same with transphobic people here.
