21: Not infrequently people say to me that they are quite interested in my writing (I am not quite sure that I believe this) but that they don’t read my political essays (which I am perfectly happy to believe).

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Not infrequently people say to me that they are quite interested in my writing (I am not quite sure that I believe this) but that they don’t read my political essays (which I am perfectly happy to believe).

The reason, they say, is that I read things that they do not read, and this makes it very hard for them to understand what the hell I am going on about. I find this fairly flattering because it implies that they do know what I am going on about some of the time.

In particular, they say that there is an entire culture war raging that people who do not read the site formerly known as Twitter are blissfully unaware of. They understand the actual words, but they don’t know the layers of ideology which have accrued around them. They don’t necessarily know that common sense is, for some people, the opposite of political correctness (and indeed that political correctness may be defined as the opposite of common sense). They don’t know that being anti-fascist is not quite the same as being against fascism, or what taking the knee means this week. They may even think that Harry Potter is a children’s book about wizards. I myself was quite surprised to discover by accident out that having an interest in older versions of Dungeons & Dragons was potentially a way of signifying that you are a misogynist and a homophobe.

It’s a bit like joining a conversation at midnight and finding that you have said exactly the wrong thing because of something someone else said at nine o’ clock.

It’s also a bit like Star Wars. Everything is also bit like Star Wars.

One of the people who doesn’t read my blog and is almost certainly not reading this was very cross slightly miffed because the final part of the first series of the Mandalorian included (in a subsidiary role) some evil robots who had previously appeared in Star Wars: Rebels and Star Wars: Clone Wars, which are cartoon series set in the Star Wars continuity. The appearance of these robots in a live action show manifested a quality my correspondent described as “being up itself”. 

Similarly, a TV reviewer in the Guardian argued that George Lucas’s corpse was being violated and his life’s work trampled, partly because the eponymous character the latest live action TV show, Ahsoka, has previously appeared in the aforementioned cartoons. This, they said, meant that the current series, was a “spin-off from a spin-off”.

On several levels, this is an odd thing to say. We probably wouldn’t describe the Empire Strikes Back, or for that matter, the Godfather Part Two as “spin-offs”, and even if we did, I am not sure that would automatically be a bad thing. A lot of people thought Frasier, which was a spin-off from Cheers, was quite funny; and some of us are quite enjoying the new series in which he goes back to academia and turns out to be an old friend of Rodney Trotter. [Check This - Ed.]

It’s a little like our dear old friend “fan-fiction”. Fan fiction certainly exists: some of my friends write stories in which characters from their favourite TV shows have sex with each other, and even ones in which they don’t.

There certainly are such things as spin-offs. A producer reportedly looked at the script for the first episode of Man About The House and immediately spotted that George and Mildred could sustain a series of their own.

But there is a way of pronouncing fan fic or spin off which simply connotes contempt for the material. It might almost be one of George Orwell’s swearwords.

Ahsoka is -- from a certain point of view -- a sequel to Star Wars: Rebels. The cartoon series ended in 2018 on a cliffhanger. The juvenile lead, trainee Jedi Ezra Bridger, had surrendered to the Empire in order to save his comrades from destruction. Ezra is, in the jargon, the McGuffin for the new series: several familiar characters and some new ones are on a Quest to find and rescue their former ship mate. So, if you haven’t seen the cartoon, you may well feel that you are coming in half way through the story.

But isn’t coming in half way through the story very much part of the Star Wars aesthetic? Didn’t the Star Wars RPG begin all it’s adventures in media res? Wasn’t the first movie retrospectively labelled Episode IV?

“I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash” snarls Carrie Fisher at Peter Cushing. We don’t know what Leia’s past connection with Tarkin is: we never particularly find out. We just take it for granted that one of the good guys has had a previous encounter with one of the bad guys. One of the things which made Star Wars so endlessly fascinating was the way characters kept talking about things they knew about and we didn't. So I am unconvinced that Ahsoka is spoiled because some of the backstory is available to people who want it in a different media?

So far as I can see, all the actual necessary information is skilfully woven into the text. In the Mandalorian, we meet a mysterious Jedi Knight. In Boba Fett we find her at Luke’s Jedi school where she mentions that she has a prior connection with his family. In the first episode of Ahsoka, she mentions in passing that Anakin never completed her training. In Episode Five… 

Perhaps I’d better not say what happens in Episode Five in case you haven’t seen it.

“But it’s not quite like that, is it, Andrew? No one is saying that if you haven’t seen Rebels it is impossible to understand Ahsoka. What some of them may be saying is that if you haven't seen the former it is impossible to care about the latter. Sure, we didn’t know who Luke Skywalker was when the curtain first went up on Episode IV: but the film itself works hard to show you that he is an important and likeable character. Ahsoka takes it for granted that you have a prior investment in the quest. If you have seen the cartoon, the first time someone says ‘Ezra Bridger’ little fireworks go off. If you haven’t they don’t.”

There is a Star Trek episode called Who Mourns For Adonis. I think it makes total sense if you don’t know that Adonis was the son of Uranus who was mauled by a wild bull. I think it makes total sense if you don’t know that Shelley used the name in a poem about his friend John Keats, who (in his opinion) was mauled by a wild poetry critic. I think it makes total sense if you don’t know that the word Adonis is commonly used to describe a handsome and athletic young man, with or without nipples. But I do think you need to be able to spot that "who mourns for Adonis" is a line from a poem, or sounds as if it might be. The title isn’t enquring who is sad about a particular mythological figure. It isn't even saying "In this story Kirk feels the same way that Lord Byron did about John Keats." It's saying something more like “Star Trek is the sort of TV show that quotes classical poetry” or more generally “Please take this episode very seriously indeed.” 

It assumes a shared cultural framework. 

Which in our case, we have not got. 

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20: An obscure 1977 religious drama by Stuart Jackman recently got an unexpected airing.

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An obscure 1977 religious drama by Stuart Jackman recently got an unexpected airing.

Radio 4 Extra was doing a tribute to the Carry On films, and the play, Post Mortem, starred Kenneth Williams. He was playing an angel named, to the vast amusement of geeks everywhere, Azariel.

I assume it must have originally gone out at Christmas. It’s set in heaven’s waiting room, and various characters associated with the birth of Jesus are being interviewed by the angel. Within a few minutes, it becomes clear that this isn’t a kind of new-age Nativity Play, but a full-on debate about forgiveness and the afterlife. The tone is established early on when King Herod, who doesn’t realise that he’s dead and thinks he’s simply been kidnapped, says that he’s a rich man and can afford to pay the ransom. The angel informs him that The Ransom has already been paid in full. There’s a fairly interesting debate about salvation and universalism running through the piece: Herod, and one of Herod’s baby-killing soldiers, get into heaven relatively easily. A certain inn-keeper looks like she’s going to have a worse time, but fortunately is able to admit that what she did was selfish and wrong. The person who is in real trouble is one of the shepherds who saw the angels and the baby Jesus but then carried on living his life exactly as before. The piece seems to straddle a social-gospel message (having seen the son of God the shepherd ought to have tried to change the world) to a soteriology in which heaven is the state of accepting the sovereignty of God—something which kings and soldiers have not much problem with, but selfish hoteliers find much harder.

If you went to a particular kind of church at a particular time you have almost certainly read The Davidson Affair, by the same writer. Modern takes on the Bible were evidently his line. It is fairly surprising that the BBC religious department were still putting out such full-on evangelical material in the 1970s. The play was produced by Frank Topping, who did a prayer slot on the Terry Wogan show and who’s dull religious poetry was much in vogue with some headmasters and RE teachers. It is hard to detach Kenneth Williams voice from Will O’ The Wisp and Rambling Sid Rumpoe, even when he isn’t comically extending his vowels, but it’s nice to just hear him playing a straight, if that isn’t an unfortunate way of putting it, part.

The big take away from the play is “Don’t try to be C.S Lewis if you are not in fact C.S Lewis.”

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the present essay.

Post Mortem had a nice little post-script in which Azrael is informed that a little girl has just arrived in the afterlife. Azrael instructs that she be given milk and chocolate biscuits, because “she won’t be staying long”.

“Do we know the name of her father?”

“Jairus.”

I assume that, even in today's secular world, relatively few listeners confronted with a list of dramatis personae which included Herod, Herod’s Soldier, the Innkeeper’s Wife and the Shepherd would have much difficulty in working out what story the BBC were riffing on. And, as a matter of fact, if a Martian or Prof Richard Dawkins had tuned in by mistake, everything is pretty much explained as we go along. “Herod” mentions that he has recently, for good and adequate reasons, massacred all the baby boys in Bethlehem, and the Innkeeper admits that she recently accommodated a heavily pregnant lady in a stable. But the post-cred gag assumes that the audience is able to identify Jairus’s Daughter—perhaps a safe bet on Radio 4 in 1977, but less so in 2023. If you don’t know, you are left thinking “Wha...what was the point of that?” 

Jackman made a fairly deliberate choice to reference Jairus’s daughter and not, for example, Lazarus. It’s an in-joke which derives its meaning from being “in”.

We need a word for this kind of thing. What do we call it when the meaning of a text assumes knowledge of other texts: when you have to have read one story to understand the meaning of another? You could call it an Easter Egg—something silly and trivial, only there because some people enjoy the game of tracking it down. You could say that it’s a Shibboleth: a little linguistic quirk that some people will pick up on and other people won’t, and which therefore serves to identify group membership. (The producers of Return to the Forbidden Planet said that lots of people laughed at the misquotes from Hamlet, but there was always a single person in the back row laughing very loudly and pointedly at the misquote from Coriolanus.) You could say that it is Fanservice or even Fanwank: something disreputable and self indulgent; a gift that the writer bestows on the cognoscenti; and a means for self-appointed so-called experts to pleasure themselves, while decent folks turn away in disgust. You could even say Intertextuality if you really wanted to.

Or you could smile sarcastically and say that it’s just a particularly clear example of what all writing is always doing at all times.

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19: Another Exercise In Translation

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(Review of Radio Play. Draft)

“In England you have to have a licence to own a television.

The money from these licences is given to the government, who give it to a public TV company to pay for new TV shows and radio programmes. Some people think that this is a good thing because the public company makes good and interesting shows. Some people think it is a bad thing because it means the company makes shows some people don’t want to watch.

Some people believe that the world was made by a powerful being they call God or Allah and those people meet up each week in places called Churches, or sometimes Synagogues or Mosques to say prayers, which is their way of talking to the being they call God or Allah.

There is a law which says that the company which gets the money from the television licence has to make some programmes each year which would be especially interesting to the kinds of people who go to Church or Synagogue or Mosque.

In the olden days, before television and the internet, cinemas or movie houses—big halls where lots of people pay to sit in comfortable chairs and watch a big screen together—were very popular. In England people specially liked funny films. There was one very funny film about a soldier. It was called Carry On, Sergeant, because that was the kind of thing that one officer might say to another officer in the English Army. (It means “take it from here” or “as you were”.) It was so popular that the same actors appeared in similar funny films, making fun of different jobs. They were called things like Carry On Doctor and Carry On Teacher. So people started to call them “Carry On...” films. Sometimes the jokes were a little bit rude. English people were usually very polite in the olden days, but they still laughed at the rude jokes.

One of the actors who appeared in these funny films was a man named Kenneth Williams. Now it sometimes happens that boys have boyfriends and girls have girlfriends. In the olden days those people were usually called “homosexuals” although nowadays they are usually called “gay”. Kenneth Williams was one of those people. In the olden days, English people were not very nice to homosexuals. If a boy was caught kissing another boy in public he could even be sent to prison. So although Kenneth Williams was a very funny man, he was also quite sad a lot of the time.

In August the English public service radio channel (the one that people’s TV licences pays for) did a series of radio programmes about the Carry On Films. The channel is called Radio 4. It only shows talk shows. Some people like it very much because it has clever people talking about difficult subjects. Some people make fun of it because it is old-fashioned and stuffy. There is also a joke that very rich people don’t listen to it very much, and ordinary people with ordinary jobs don’t listen to it at all, but the in-between people who work in offices and schools listen to it all the time.

One of the programmes was a very old play with Kenneth Williams in it. It was a serious play and he played a serious character. In the Carry On films, Kenneth Williams was always very silly and very funny, so it was quite surprising and quite interesting to hear him playing a serious part. The play had been one of the programmes that was intended for people who believed in God and went to church, which, as we mentioned, the public service channels had to make in those days.

Andrew likes stories about space ships and wizards very much indeed. Sometimes he uses the internet to talk to other people who like them almost as much as he does. People often make fun of people who like stories about space ships and wizards. They say that they only like the stories because they are shy and lonely and don’t know how to talk to ordinary people. (Do you think this is fair?) A lot of those people liked a book called Good Omens very much. Good Omens was turned into a TV series. There has been a second TV series which continues where the book left off, even though one of the men who wrote the first book has sadly died.

Some of the people who believe in God also think that God has magical servants who take messages and help good people. Those servants are called angels. People who believe in God treat angels very seriously and treat them with great respect; but Good Omens is a funny book and the angels in it are quite silly. This is because the book is making fun of people who do believe in God, but because the book is quite funny and quite clever most of the people who believe in God didn’t mind too much.

The main character in Good Omens is an angel called Aziraphale. And guess what? The character Kenneth Williams played in the very old radio play was an angel called Azariel! A lot of the people who liked Good Omens thought it was quite funny that the names were so similar. Some of them listened to the radio play to see if the two characters had anything in common. But in fact....”

(Draft breaks off at this point.)

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18: I like Star Trek. I used to like Arthur C Clarke. I am re-reading the Hugh Walters books which I adores when I was a kid.

I like Star Trek. I used to like Arthur C Clarke. I am re-reading the Hugh Walters books which I adored when I was a kid.

But I am moved to ask. In what way would it be a Good Thing for Humanity to become Multi-Planetary?

--Because if we carry on breeding at the present rate, there won’t be room for all of us on one little planet?

But we have very decent methods of birth control. All of us can have as much sex as we want to without suffocating the rest.

--Because we don’t want to use birth control: because making human babies is a Good Thing in itself, the more babies, the better

But where is this written: what is the moral imperative which says that the most important thing is for there to be the greatest possible number of human beings alive?

--Because we don’t want to become extinct?

Why not? Particularly? I mean, I would certainly like to live a long and healthy life. I suppose I kind of assume that in ten million years there will still be some humans; and I kind of assume that in ten million years there will not be any elephants. But I am not sure that’s a Good Thing. Certainly not the only Good Thing. What cosmic trolley problem tells me that, if it come to a choice, I ought to wipe out the elephants and preserve the humans?

--Because there is an evolutionary imperative that says that we—our species—should survive?

I agree that Darwin says that the fittest survive, because “most able to survive” is what “fittest” means. I do not see how it follows that I, an embodied consciousness with agency, ought to make choices that blind evolution was going to make in any case. “You have to work very hard to make this happen because this will happen inevitably whether you work very hard or not” is a funny precept to live your life by. Individual humans certainly have an instinct to preserve their own lives; but they also have the ability to override that instinct. When someone jumps onto a grenade in order to save his comrades, we call him brave. When someone says that they aren’t getting into that bloody space rocket because they might get blown up, we call them cowards.

There are times when it would be better to play the antique Roman than the Dane. If I thought the human race was going to evolve into Nazis or Daleks or Daily Express readers then I might decide that pushing the button and bringing the species to an end would be quite a good choice. Have you never seen Beneath The Planet Of the Apes?

--Because interplanetary travel, frontiers, the Wild West, men were real men and women were real women, an acre of land, stage coaches: humans digging mines and planting crops and building Jerusalem on Mars’s ochre and pleasant land?

I do see the appeal, for a certain sort of person, of the frontier spirit. I like science fiction movies, and some people like cowboy films. Star Trek started life explicitly as a western set in space. But digging trenches and building log cabins is pretty much the same experience whether you do it on earth, Mars or Planet Zog. You can only be in one place at a time. I think I’d rather have folk music and comic books and beer and flat whites on earth, thank you very much.

The first colonists didn’t come to America because they thought that coming to America was a good thing it itself and there was a moral imperative on Europeans to become multi-continental. They came because they were militant protestants and wanted a Christianity purified of residual Catholic elements. Later they came because the potato crop was infected and there was work to be had and railroads to be built and money to be earned. What they wanted was a house and a wife and some kids and a fiddle and a jar of Guinness. Migrating was the means to an end. To what end is interplanetary travel the means?

--To seek out new life and new civilisation?

Now this interests me. But it occurs to me to ask: for what reason do we want to seek these things out?

--Because other forms of life and other forms of civilisation would have their own culture, their own stories; their own ways of looking at the world: because once we have sat and talked with a three-gendered silicon based hamster our own understanding of personhood will be wider and bigger?

But we already share this existing planet with dolphins and whales and octopuses. If I talk about looking at the world from their point of view then I am apt to be called a hippy, a tree-hugger, and indeed woke. And we share this existing planet with human cultures—Maori and Inuit and Japanese and Texans—who see and perceive and understand the universe very differently from the ways in which we do. But any suggestion that a science department might take account of Maori cultural modes of understanding elicits hoots of derision from the science bros. Why would we be more interested in the modes of thinking on Alpha Centauri?

You used to see a T-shirt, I suppose from the Vietnam era. “Join the Army. Travel the world. Meet new people. Learn how to kill them.” If we travel the universe and encounter sentient lifeforms with different sciences and different cultures, isn’t it overwhelmingly likely that what we will do is kill them? Or enslave them? Or eat them? Or keep them as pets? Or is the plan simply to wipe out their ecosystems and drill for petrochemicals?

--Because humans have a quality called sentience or consciousness; and this is such a preposterously unlikely thing to have developed that it is vitally important to preserve it, because the chances of it existing anywhere else is vanishingly unlikely?

I get this one. It doesn’t really matter how many planets and flesh suits and rain forests we flatten, provided somewhere in the universe there are still minds.

It’s a spiritual, almost a religious proposition. Consciousness over mere stuff. It’s a throwback, in a way, to nineteenth century ideas of Life Forces and Bergsonian notions of creative evolution. In Stapleton’s great Starmaker, human consciousnesses turn into planetary consciousnesses and planetary consciousnesses turn into galactic consciousnesses and finally a universal consciousness which is able to get in touch with THE STAR MAKER. One thinks of Stephen Hawking wondering rhetorically if the right equations will allow us to know the mind of God.

Harold Bloom suggested that the core American faith was not orthodox Christianity, but a kind of gnosticism in which dispersed minds reached out for the deity. It lies behind Mormonism and Christian Science and Country and Western music. There’s a God out there and if we jump up and down and make a fuss we can maybe attract his attention. 

I get it. If there is nothing which can perceive the universe there is not much point in the universe bothering to exist. And I have a lot of time for faith positions. But if “the human race ought to become interplanetary” is a religious belief, let’s come clean and say so.

If humans are not the only sentience in the universe, then I have different questions. What is so precious about our particular version of sentience that compels us to generate more of it? When we encounter other minds, will we learn from them, teach them, or ex-ter-min-ate them?

And any way: haven’t we de-centred human consciousness? Aren’t we all agreed that we are not autonomous divine sparks in flesh suits, but passive objects being acted on by indifferent mind viruses? Why is it so important to carry those viruses to Mars?

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