Those really were the days

Re: Lords reform et alia...

So, after ten years and umpteen teases, Smallville has finally come to an end in exactly the way it was always supposed to. In the last few minutes of the finale the Big Guy dons the blue tights and red y-fronts, then flies like the wind, saves Lois Lane, reverses the end of the world, and captures the flag for truth, justice and the American way. For the loyalists who stuck with the show from the beginning, the payoff was surely well worth it. In fact there’s a Royal Wedding/death of bin Laden sense of closure and rightness that makes me feel Smallville will be looked back upon by future cultural historians as one of the defining television shows of the first decade of the twenty-first century – what Dallas and Dynasty were to the optimistic, go-getting 1980s or what The X-Files was to the paranoid but callow 1990s.

Probably the most pleasing aspect of last week’s finale, and yet at the same time a bittersweet one, was the inclusion of the John Williams theme from the movies to play over the closing credits. By now, clearly, the Williams theme is pretty much hardwired into the Superman mythos, and having Superman without those thundering, Wagnerian leitmotifs would be like having James Bond without Monty Norman. In other words Superman now belongs to movie audiences just as much as to the comic-book geeks, if not more so. He really has slipped not just the surly bonds of Earth but also the bonds of the comic-genre that nurtured him.

The English equivalent of Smallville is of course Merlin, a BBC TV-show made by virtually the same people who make Doctor Who and which follows the same “early years” pattern for Britain’s famous magician as Smallville does for America’s Man of Steel. I think the reason it just about works is that Merlin is the character from the Matter of Britain who has retained the deepest and most enduring resonance in our post-imperial age. Just as Superman is a symbol of America the superpower, so Merlin is a symbol of power behind the throne, and of influence by counsel and cunning rather than by direct intervention. The Doctor, in fact, is just one of his incarnations, in an age when even Britain’s more active, physical heroes such as James Bond require subtlety and subterfuge to make up for a lack of cavalry charges.

I read last week that there’s now a new “young Merlin” film in the pipeline. It’s based on T A Barron’s The Lost Years of Merlin series. I’d never heard of this series before, so a couple of days ago I ordered up a second-hand library copy of the first volume from Amazon. It arrived in the post two days ago and I started reading it on the train yesterday morning. Nothing terribly exciting so far, especially as the author promises in his introduction to draw on Irish rather than Welsh myth to start off with. But it may be OK.

Then again, the author is an American, and no American ever lost points for sucking up to Irish sentiment – even when Ireland itself has now been reduced to the ultimate indignity of sucking up to the hated old mother country. Barack’s whistle-stop tour of the Emerald Isle of course came barely a week after Brenda’s historic state visit there, and of course he is enjoying the hospitality of our own green and pleasant land even as I write.

Well, if Cameron’s aim now is to out-blair Blair, why shouldn’t Obama aim to out-dubya Dubya?

One of my long-standing historical pet theories is that the political history of Northumberland has really been a centuries-long vendetta between the Percys and the Greys. Seeing their name on the “Dering Roll” at Dover Castle on Saturday reminded me that the Percys really did, in Wodehouse’s inimitable phrase, come over with the Conqueror. They were loyalists during the Civil War, and one of them even before then had been in on the Gunpowder Plot. In 1780 Algernon Percy, 1st Earl of Beverley was in charge of the Northumberland Militia when they helped put down the Gordon Riots. Henry “Hotspur” Percy, of Shakespearean fame, is probably their most famous scion. The most notorious of the Greys on the other hand was that great Shakespearean villain Grey the Southampton traitor to Henry V. To this day, the Percys at Alnwick are solid Torys and the Greys are staunch Liberals.

Dover Castle

I spent the Royal Wedding and the various Easter and May bank holidays before and after it revising for my tax exam. About the exam itself I am now hopeful rather than confident, but since then I’ve generally been trying to relax. Not too hard, it has to be said! The single biggest excitement of last week was Thursday’s deadline for the P14 and P35s. In the event, the overwhelming bulk of them had been filed by the night before, and I spent Wednesday evening celebrating with friends at a German beer-cellar-style pub near Chancery Lane.

On Saturday, I finally had my first real outing since I started this blog. It was a day-trip to Dover Castle, where I don’t actually remember ever having been before. I feel now that I’ve spent my entire life overlooking it, given that it’s a vast, sprawling edifice both spatially and diachronically, with a root in practically every age of British history from the Romans to the Saxons to the Middle-Ages to Napoleon and Hitler. It’s also the spiritual home of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, which again is rather more interesting historically than you’d think. Indeed of all the regiments that were involved in the Mahdi Army’s little intifada in al-Amarah in 2004, they arguably acquitted themselves least dishonourably, at one point chalking up more frequent contacts than any British Army unit had seen at any time since Korea, and eventually walking away with the last VC to date to have been awarded to a living soldier – Pte Beharry.

In truth my interest in Dover Castle was originally piqued last year, when I’d read about English Heritage’s no-expense-spared restoration project on the medieval keep. The Male still has a report on the result, with piccies, here, and Channel 4’s Baldrick even did a Time Team Special about it – which is special in that it’s just Baldrick doing it, and not the actual team, so it’s actually just about watchable. It’s still available on Channel 4’s 4oD site here.

UPDATE: In response to Naturgesetz's question about the PWRR, it's a new, amalgamated regiment (founded 1992, I think), though it draws on the history and traditions of its predecessors. I have a nasty suspicion it was dedicated to Princess Diana simply because she was popular at the time. (How long before we have the Duke of Cambridge's Own Marine Corps? One wonders.)

The PWRR's official website is here.