According to Brian Blessed, Flash Gordon is a cult classic at Buckingham Palace.

Flash Gordon was a peculiarly camp 1980 film which featured the muscular actor Sam J Jones in the title role and a soundtrack from Queen. Although it was, of course, the rock band rather than the monarch, the film still appears to have achieved a devoted following among the courtiers at Buckingham Palace.

Indeed, Brian Blessed, who played the winged Prince Vulcan, now admits that he can’t visit the Palace without one of the boys yelling at him his big line from the film: “Gordon’s alive!”

And I can't think why!

Witch-hunter-hunters, Bigots and Fantasists: The Sorry Face of the Modern MSM

If the Moonbat and the gruesome Mrs Bercow both get the pants sued off them then who's going to worry? If the whole paedophile fantasy suddenly deflates like a giant kids' party balloon, making amusing farting sounds as it does so, then so much the better. And if the Labour Party's obnoxious chief fantasist Tom Watson, who may now officially have gone too far, has finally fallen from his pedestal then I shall not shed a single tear.

The turning point, interestingly enough, probably came last Thursday morning, when Phillip Schofield on live TV did his Joseph McCarthy thing and tried to present the PM with a list of known Communists within the Democrat Party suspected paedophiles in the upper echelons of the Tory Party. The PM responded somewhat oddly that he didn't want the whole paedo-hysteria to devolve into an anti-gay witch-hunt.

And who can blame him? The old Private Eye headline 'Top poof denies rumours that he's a closet Tory' ought, in theory, to work for the likes of Lord McAlpine. Except that even back in the 1960s, when even Private Eye was still all "ooh er nasty" and "homophobic" about gay people, actually being gay was still basically OK. It wasn't illegal anymore and hardly anyone thought it should be. But it was still seen as funny (in both senses). Having the hots for tots, on the other hand, is just as illegal now as it's always been, and that's good news for anyone who stills needs a handy scapegoat in a hurry.

And thanks to the weird world of the modern media (not to mention our country's libel laws, which still thankfully have both their bad points and their good points) scapegoats now work even better if they're already dead. When he was alive, Jimmy Savile was little short of a living saint. Now that he's dead, it can safely be said that he was the worst kiddie-fiddler who ever stalked the corridors of power. Call no man happy until he's dead? Certainly! But make damn sure he's dead before you say he's a paedo.

Indeed, it would appear that history really is bunk, if by history we mean the hatchet-jobs that people can only write about a man once he is safely planted. Apparently now only "current affairs" still suffers (or should that be 'suffer'?) from such tedious constraints as "fairness", "balance" and (whisper it) "truth". The old adage that the Truth will set you free then becomes somewhat redundant, provided you can escape from Truth into the comforting world of "history", where what actually happened matters a good deal less than how what you can read and write about it makes you feel.

So what went wrong? All one can assume is that, in the ongoing battle for media control between the Press and the British Establishment, Auntie for various reasons has for now ended up on what the rest of the media will have deemed "the wrong side". So when the Jimmy Savile nonsense blew up all manner of grudges were aired. And so, in response, Newsnight et al panicked, and didn't so much go back to the drawing board as back to old tittle-tattle cuttings books that had been gathering dust since the era of Kincora and Colin Wallace. They certainly did need a scapegoat and fast, and lo and behold they thought they'd found one.

As it turned out, fingering Lord McAlpine (and without actually naming him) was a fairly desperate stunt. The PM on Thursday used the term 'witch-hunt'. He also, of course, played the 'gay' card, which rather turned the tables on the mob. (In fact, whilst looking rather pointedly at Phillip Schofield in his fabulous mauve shirt, I rather thought he used the word 'gay' with a degree of menance I hadn't heard in a long time.) The most extraordinary thing about this particular witch-hunt though (as the ever invaluable Brendan O'Neill reveals here and here) is that the individual behind Newsnight's ludicrous, defensive, "We're not covering up paedos (i.e. not like the Catholic Church)"-report is genuinely obssessed not just with imaginary Welsh political paeodophile rings but also with actual witchcraft.

This particular character, with the appropriately Dickensian name Angus Stickler, hails from an organisation called the Bureau of Investigative Journalists. And if that sounds like a bunch of pitiful hacks pretending that they're Scully and Mulder, there may be a reason for that. Because Mr Stickler is, amongst other things, a keen investigator into human sacrifice, particularly amongst members of Britain's "African community", and no less a dogged pursuivant of African clergymen who supposedly murder children they think are witches. So in other words he's a human-sacrificer-hunter and a witch-hunter-hunter!

And of course

When Stickler, isn’t seeking out political paedophiles in North Wales or African witch-killers in London, he is putting the boot into alleged paedophile rings in the Catholic Church. Indeed, according to a 2003 Guardian report, Stickler was originally recruited to the Today programme in order to “cause trouble for the Roman Catholic Church” (something the BBC loves doing, of course), which he duly did with a series of reports about Catholic paedophilia.

'Nuff said, one would have thought!

As O'Neill sagely notes, this is what has become of supposedly serious journalism. Once the preserve of the dull but credible, now even Auntie and The Grauniad seem to have been taken over by bigots (anti-Catholic ones and otherwise), fantasists, and those who are rather more ready to believe there are paedophiles under our beds - not to mention in high places - than is altogether psychologically healthy.

UPDATE: And lo and behold, an anti-paedophile witch-hunt involving actual, bona fide witches! They're from the West Country, interestingly enough, which like Lancashire was a notorious redoubt for papistical old ways following the Civil War and hence also a magnet for witch-hunters. In Lancashire it was of course typically Catholic families that were targeted for suspicious behaviour, and fingered, especially by children, for all manner of lurid wickednesses. Of course, if  these particular witches on trial at the moment get off (so to speak), after however many Catholic priests in recent times have been both accused and convicted of similarly improbable crimes, we'll know we've come full-circle.

Ender's Game

I like Ender Wiggin and I like Asa Butterfield. Can I actually imagine the latter as the former? Just about, I think! To be fair, the lad was definitely up for it, sounding off with "The Enemy's gate is down!" and similar splendidly gung-ho noises on his Twitter-feed when he heard that he'd got the part. And in many ways a young man who's breakthrough was as an unwitting Nazi moppet in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and who then went on to play the young Mordred (as in he who is prophesied to bring King Arthur's empire down in flames) in the BBC's Merlin series, is in many ways inspired casting. From Hugo to Hugo Award? Maybe!

I can also really imagine Harrison Ford as Col Graff. I can actually hear Ford growling out that very first line of dialogue, which opens the book. And it is one the great opening lines of literary science-fiction.

It's a great pity therefore that we're probably not actually going to hear him say it.

Indeed, it's a pity, albeit an inevitable one, that they're not actually making a film of Ender's Game. Indeed, they can't make a film of Ender's Game, for the simple reason that Ender's Game, almost by definition, is unfilmable.

Ender's Game the book starts with a six-year-old boy kicking another child to death.

The kid doing the kicking is the eponymous hero.

It gets progressively more disturbing from then on in.

A film of Ender's Game would be like a sci-fi version of Harry Potter in which the hero really is Slytherin's heir. It's not just Lord of the Flies in space. It's also Reservoir Dogs done by the tweenage cast of Bugsy Malone, only with real mindless violence. The shower scene in Psycho was particularly disturbing in its time because it broke all the rules. Ender's Game's shower scene makes the shower fight in School Ties seem like something out of a children's film by comparison.

In Ender's Game, Orwell's proverbial booted foot stamping down on a human face (only literally!) belongs to a pint-sized Napoleon devil-child who goes on to save the universe largely in a fit of absentmindedness. The British Empire may have been the world's sweetest and most boyish master. In Orson Scott Card's universe the boyish saviour of the galaxy is a focused and unbending little Hitlerjunge who wins every game he plays and defeats and annihilates every enemy who crosses his path.

Suffice it to say then that Ender's Game is not a book that's suitable for children. For all that they'll tell their miniature charges not to judge a book by its cover, it's still astonishing the number of school librarians who complain that the bad language in Ender's Game is "inappropriate" merely because it normally has a picture of a sweet little boy on the front. And an actual film version of Ender's Game would certainly not be suitable for adults either.

Militarism has of course been a mainstay in mainstream sci-fi since the Golden Age of the 1950s, from the dogfights in space in Dan Dare through to those of Star Wars. Throw in a Kwisatz Haderach or two from Dune (George Lucas's other great inspiration) and there's not much else to Ender's Game, at least on the surface. Orson Scott Card merely pushes the envelope further than most in terms of realism and then allows the moral and psychological implications of interplanetary genocide to explore themselves.

My second big misgiving about the upcoming Ender's Game film then is that it's very seldom the case that cult books automatically get made into cult films. For every Blade Runner there are a dozen Dark is Risings and a gazillion Lord of the Ringses. And often, after all, it's not entirely clear what the point of making the film was anyway. Dune was a cult book that gave birth to Star Wars. Ender's Game itself arguably led to The Last Starfighter and War Game. (By the time of the Second Persian Gulf War in 1991, the point that computer games and real wars can be hard to distinguish had quite literally been made to death.) But David Lynch's film version of Dune is to this day one of the great lessons of film history in how not to make a film of a book. Again, Edgar Rice Burrows was one of the great godfathers of modern science-fiction. So what exactly was the point of making a film version of John Carter, when countless films inspired by John Carter (one, two or even three generations down the line) had already been made. Will the new Ender's Game give us space battles better than the ones George Lucas gave us back in the 1970s? I doubt it. Will the Battle School seem more realistic than Starfleet Academy in Star Trek? Maybe not! Is the zero-g stuff going to be more realistic than the zero-g stuff in Apollo 13? Probably not. Is this most epic of books going to be adapted into a film on the same epic scale as 2001: A Space Odyssey? It seems unlikely. Will it even have the same haunting psychological insight as Solaris (either version)? Well, what do you think? We're talking about the man who gave as Wolverine as a kid, after all! (It opened promisingly enough with Troye Sivan in his pyjamas*, but once he'd grown up into Hugh Jackman even the great Aussie hunk himself couldn't quite save it.)

This then is my final point. Ender's Game's strength as a work of literature lies in its morality and psychology. Its starting point is the Battle School, which is a splendid invention and a remarkable feat of science-fiction in and of itself, but it then uses the Battle School to answer an important moral question. Whereas Songmaster pondered the possibility that a wicked man (an evil galactic emperor) can love and be loved (by a boy), Ender's Game asks how a good person (a sweet little boy) can end up doing something worse than anything Hitler ever did. The space marines background is really just window dressing.

So in an age when a crass and corpulent Kiwi can turn the twentieth century's greatest and most subtle work of fiction into a bloated and tedious nine-hour-long toy commercial (and can sweep the board at the Oscars with it as well), perhaps an eye-candy, space-opera shoot-'em-up is the best we can hope for. But it won't be the genre-redefining cult epic that it ought to be, which will be disappointing (and one can expect disappointment in advance). And it certainly won't be Ender's Game.

*Actually, Messrs Butterfield and Sivan can presumably count themselves lucky. Pity young Laurence Belcher, who one can only presume landed the role of the kid version of Professor X because someone saw him in his stripey jim-jams in the Doctor Who Xmas special. (Speaking of which, I love this.) Jake Lloyd's transition from judo kit in Jingle All the Way to Jedi cozzie followed a similar logic. (But I digress.)

The Doctor's Girls... and Boys

Click to enlarge!

Fabian Hambüchen

He seems to be Germany's answer to Tom Daley (for whom I was actually quietly rooting - until, despite having himself been badly bullied at school, he started having children arrested by the police for virtually no reason).

Fabian Hambüchen looks like he was the youngest and cheekiest member of Team Deutschland (or whatever the Kraut equivalent of Team GB was). He also seems to have been good at what he did.

The reason why I compared him with Tom Daley is that quickly browsing on Google Images I came across all sorts of photos of him as a kid alongside stories of his underage stardom, so presumably he was a real Wunderkind. And apparently there are now hundreds of sweet piccies of him out there, which will no doubt soon be deleted by anxious fans terrified of the paedo-crazies.

He actually has blond hair and green eyes. (See here for some close-up pics, from a guy apparently more interested in Hambüchen's contact lenses than in his athletic ability.) But with any luck, he's someone Germans will genuinely be able to feel proud of.

 Preparing

Celebrating

At London 2012 the other day

A hug for the coach

 And a very brotherly hug for Dutch rival and gold medalist Epke Zonderland. (Hambüchen won silver.)

To Play the King

I re-watched To Play the King recently. It’s actually a really good sequel to House of Cards, but it also holds up perfectly well in its own right.

I seriously suspect that Francis Urquhart is actually a Jacobite. It would make sense, after all, especially given his name (Highlands, but presumably with a nod towards Oxford's first Catholic don since the Reformation) and his little speech to right at the end of the series about how his family came south with James I and have been loyal to the Crown "since before your family [i.e. the King's] were even heard of". I also remember one of the Diana conspiracy theories (which of course To Play the King predates, in much the same way that that episode of The Lone Gunmen predated the crackpot 9/11 "truther" theories) which claimed that she was assassinated in order to prevent a restoration of the Stuart monarchy. All of which was presumably meant to make Urquhart seem even more evil, but which to me just makes him seem even more cool.

Because the great gamble of the role for the late Ian Richardson, who played the character to perfection, is that Urquhart is very cool. He's a liar, a thief, a philanderer, a murderer and, by the end of the second and third series in the House of Cards trilogy, a traitor and a war criminal. And yet at the same time he's both the quintessential gentleman villian and, no less, a fully three-dimensional monster on the Richard III model. His soliloquies and asides draw the viewer in, and for all his wickedness it's disturbingly easy to see things from his point of view and even root for him.

Another fascinating thing from today's point of view is that even the Tory politics of To Play the King are played "for real". For all that Urquhart's attitude to the King's liberal, "caring", proto-Blairite mush is very much raw, personal, political and technocratic, it's hard not to nod at everything both Urquhart and especially his chief adviser Sarah Harding have to say. Because the simply facts of the matter are that the welfare state is much too large, public spending is out of control and has been since the 1990s, our dealings with terrorists in Northern Ireland were utterly dishonourable, and there is a great deal to be said for cutting taxes, balancing budgets, restoring National Service, abolishing vagrancy, and so on.

I even found myself wondering how much of the Blair persona had actually grown out of Michael Kitchen's splendid performance as the King - who is really nothing like the Prince of Wales, and is instead a fully and cleverly imagined character in his own right. And given quite what a train-wreck the wretched Blair creature and his brutish henchmen made of this country in real life, it's hard not to think whimsically of a world with a few more Francis Urquharts in it.

At the same time though, for all the glories of the rest of it, To Play the King is almost worth watching just for the very last scene (which has the final credits rolling over it).