Some questions

I haven't gone in for the questions meme that's been going around, but pbristow got some questions from somebody called Nanila that I rather liked, so I'm going to answer some of those as a one-off. I can't better his description of a filkcon, but the others went as follows;

* What would your dream job be?

Easy. I'd get to live here and look after the Countess as now, but I would also be expected to come up with a certain amount of creative work each day, as for instance a sizeable chunk of a story, or a number of songs either composed or arranged (or both), and for those I'd be paid a reasonable amount on a piecework basis. I think with that kind of incentive I could manage to put in a solid eight hours of work per day, and I'd be quite happy not to be paid if I didn't come up with the goods (because I believe I could).

* What instrument produces your favourite sounds?

Timpani are nice, as are gongs and all kinds of orchestral instruments, but I think my favourite sound of all, for reasons I can not remotely explain, is the muted cornett (not the brass instrument, but the mediaeval one which I thought was an enclosed-reed instrument, but which apparently isn't). I heard one at a folk festival that willibald and eoforyth took us to, that featured a band called Strawhead, and it really got to me.

* What got you interested in acting?

A series of recordings called "Living Shakespeare," issued by Odhams back in the seventies I think. They were abridged recordings of the plays, starring actors such as Peter Finch and Barbara Jefford, and they introduced me to the joy of speaking Will's words, and a lot of the things actors do to get the emotion across. They were on LPs, so long gone now, but I'd love to find them again.

* What is your favourite Doctor/Companion pairing? (Why?)

Third Doctor and Jo. It's a tough choice, but I have always felt that Jo Grant gets a raw deal purely because Katy Manning was blonde and had a squeaky voice. She was always meant to be more than a ditzy dolly bird, I think, though obviously some writers served her better than others, and at her best she was just as "equal" to the Doctor as any who came before or after, and without diminishing his character the way the writers of nuWho have elected to do. She, if anyone, was a poster girl for the idea that ordinary humans can be just as wonderful as Time Lords.

Boxing Day tomorrow. See you then.

Special effects

Somewhere in the last years of the twentieth century, a genie escaped from a bottle...

Once there were just plays. Actors speaking lines on a stage, in costumes, waving fake swords and pretending to die. If they wanted thunder, then maybe they had a chap in the wings with a sheet of metal waggling it around. How they did lightning before the electric light bulb I do not know. But there was a kind of unspoken agreement between the company and the audience (well, unspoken till Shakespeare laid out the terms in the opening speech of Henry V) that you understood what they were trying to achieve and gave them the credit. Think when we talk of horses that you see them and so forth. If anyone had interrupted King Lear's famous storm scene to say "you know it's just a man with a metal sheet, don't you?" they would have been roundly shushed, because what was the point? It would just have been spoiling it for everyone else.

Then there were films, and Georges Melies, and filmmakers started to realise that you could do convincing effects--thunder that really sounded like thunder, model ships that actually sank beneath the rolling waves of the studio tank, explosions that really went bang, rockets that looked as if they were actually going to the moon. And somewhere along the way, some people started saying "it's only a model." I don't know why. No filmmaker had, as far as I know, tried to claim that Charlton Heston was actually talking to God in the Ten Commandments, or that they had actually brought in a genuine radioactive dinosaur to attack Tokyo or reanimated a real dead man in a genuine laboratory, but the game changed; it was no longer about enjoying the story, it was about catching them out. Maybe it carried over from stage magic; maybe the irritating fellow in the audience who kept saying "it's up his sleeve" and "they do it with mirrors, you know" decided to start frequenting the picture palaces instead. I don't know. But like a disease, it spread, and there was no way filmmakers or workers in the new industry of television could fight it, because, well, yes, they were fake explosions, and it wasn't real blood, and it wasn'ta real metal corridor in a genuine space station, and why should it be? Why weren't they watching the story?

So now we have people moaning about how obvious the CGI is in nuWho or LOTR, and doing their level best to spoil it for those of us who still like to immerse themselves in the story and give the storytellers the credit, because they (the moaners) are far more interested in showing off how clever they are to have spotted the trick. As if there was ever going to be a real Gollum to cast, or a real Time Lord who can turn into a skeleton. And you can not listen, but that kind of vitiates one of the main points of these things, which is that it's a shared experience.

The genie is out of the bottle. The contract between storyteller and audience is broken, and not by the storytellers, but by people who don't want to tell stories themselves, just to make it more difficult for those who do. There are ways around it--the film of the Call Of Cthulhu, that I've raved about before, gets you so thoroughly immersed in the artificial idiom of the silent film that by the time Cthulhu actually appears you are perfectly comfortable with it being a silent-film-type effect, and happily ignore all the subtle technological wizardry that recreates 1920s America in the background--but that's a very specialised solution, and wouldn't work with your general run of films and telly shows.

If there's any good to come out of this, then maybe it's this; no-one can pick holes in the special effects you get in books or on radio, so the pictures there will always be better. But it's a meagre kind of consolation for the loss of trust.