A White Piece of Paper

Irish Campaign for Marriage Equality: Sinead's Hand

2009-09-02T22:05:28Z

FYI, pass the message on.

2009-08-18T23:59:16Z

There will be a citizens' rally in Grosvenor Square, London at 5.30pm on Wednesday 19th August, kicking off in front of the statue of President Roosevelt. The aim of this rally will be to send a simple message to the American people via a banner that will read:

GO FOR IT AMERICA.

OUR NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE IS A BLESSING FOR ALL.

LGBT Network Europe: Petition to the Scottish Parliament

2009-02-24T13:50:42Z

This week, I've been campaigning around the university on behalf of the LGBT Network Europe.

We are asking the Scottish Parliament to consider amending the Marriage (Scotland) Act so that same-sex couples will be allowed to register a civil marriage, or, if they wish and there is agreement by the relevant faith group, a religious marriage.

We believe this to be important for a number of reasons:

+ there are over 70 legal rights that married couples have and civil partnered couples do not -- these include but are not limited to the right to adopt children as a couple, the right of a step-parent to ask for and be granted parental rights and responsibilities over their partner's biological children, and the right to be considered jointly for tax purposes

+ there are many gay men and women of faith and there are a growing number of faith groups that would happily marry these people, but, as the law stands, same-sex couples are not entitled to a marriage and civil partnerships are not legal if they are performed by a minister, in a religious building, or include any religious references within the ceremony

+ if a same-sex couple has registered a civil marriage in Spain or Holland, where there is no difference between a marriage registered by a same-sex couple and one registered by a heterosexual couple, and then comes to Scotland, their relationship is downgraded to a civil partnership

Because of the last point, all of this is going to eventually lead to a court case that will be heard in Brussels, but we know that it could be up to three years before it gets there, and we want the Scottish Parliament to look at it before that. It is the first in what will be many, many steps -- all we're asking for at the moment is for them to look at it, and think about it, and have an open debate about why it can be done or why it can't be done.

The petition closes on March 6th.

It is available to sign here on the Scottish Parliament website until then, and, crucially, you do not have to be in or live in Scotland to sign it.

This post is unlocked and I am leaving it that way, and please feel free to spread it around.

sefkhet @ 2008-11-04T11:16:00

2008-11-04T11:18:14Z

GET OUT AND VOTE!

On decisions being made by those who show up.

2008-11-03T12:51:48Z

To all Americans:

Vote tomorrow.

I can't even begin to articulate how important this is. You have a voice. If you care about your life, your future, your childrens' future, or your country, please, please start using it.

John Barrowman: The Making Of Me

2008-07-27T20:35:39Z

We are probably going to end up filing this under the heading of, Things I Really Can't Believe I Actually Sat And Wrote.

For the people who have no earthly idea what I'm about to talk about, a number of months ago John Barrowman embarked on a quest to find out what made him gay. He's spent his entire adult life believing -- and the last ten years or so telling the press very loudly -- that he was born this way, that he didn't choose it and that it wasn't caused by the environment he grew up in. The programme aired on Thursday night. It didn't really tell me anything that I didn't already know, other than the fact that we're now apparently dumbing science down to the most appalling levels, but I suspect it wasn't meant for me. I think it was meant for people who are struggling with their sexuality, parents and relatives who are struggling with a loved one's sexuality, and people who think that those of us who are of a different sexual orientation than they themselves are immoral and wrong and damned to eternal torment. The fact that the people in the third category will hardly have been watching a show that was billed the way this one was doesn't seem to have troubled them much. I intended to write a short review of it, and what happened is that I ended up writing... well, something not quite so short. It has subtitles, for crying out loud.

1. Establishing Orientation

The first thing they wanted to establish was that, no matter whether sexuality is caused by nature or nurture, it is not something we choose or something we have the power to change, and this is probably the only time I'm going to be nice about the science.

He was hooked up to a penile plethysmograph and shown images of naked men and naked women, and the reactions of his penis to this erotica was measured. This is apparently a technique they used during the Vietnam War, to figure out who was claiming to be gay just to dodge the draft and who was really gay, and that, by the way, is messed up on all kinds of levels. He was also put into an MRI for an hour and a half and shown erotica, and the blood flow through his brain was observed -- basically, blood flow to certain higher brain centres increases when you're aroused, and this is what people mean when they talk about the brain being the biggest erogenous zone anyone has.

At the end of this experiment, we discover that Barrowman is 100% gay.

I can hear the shock and surprise from here. Really.

But, seriously, that's important. It's probably one of the most important parts of the whole thing, because there are still people in the world who claim that gay people could be different if they wanted to, that we make a choice to be sexually attracted to and aroused by our own gender rather than by the opposite gender, and it gets a little harder to say that when you see that, physiologically, a gay man has literally no reaction whatsoever to naked women and really a great deal of reaction to naked men.

2. The Ex-Gay Story

One of the issues they also mentioned was the question of whether homosexuality is something that can be 'cured'. Now, I normally wouldn't need to say this, but I'm leaving this post unlocked, so just on the off chance that anyone who hasn't known me for years and years should read that and get the wrong idea, I'm gonna point out here really, really loudly that I don't think that anyone's sexuality is anything that needs to be cured, but, you know, other people do. In my opinion, these two small segments were two of the best parts we got to see.

There was a British radio guy whose voice I feel like I should recognise, who was admitted to a mental institution to be... re-educated. I don't think I can do justice to his story, anyone who knows anything about how the psychiatric profession tried to cure gay people of their afflictions back in the middle of the last century or anyone who's ever read any Pat Barker will have some idea of what he's gone through. It felt real. It didn't feel like the plasticky, fake, LA pseudoscience (sorry, guys). And it said something very profound about the damage that was done to people in the pursuit of so-called normality. It's not something that happened centuries ago, not something that lives only in the pages of history books, not something we can write off as having been done by uneducated barbarians in the 'olden days'. It's something that happened to people who are still alive and really not all that old.

The second segment of this part was an American man who claims to be ‘ex-gay’. I'll say first of all that it took them a long time to find someone who was both ex-gay and willing to talk to them, but they did, and I did say that he claims to be ex-gay and I used that language for a reason. The important thing here, maybe the most important thing in all of the 58 minutes that made it to air, is that John made a very good point about arousal and blood flow patterns not being something you can fake and his response to that was to say as clearly as one possibly could without forming the actual words that he is still attracted to men but he chooses not to have sex with men, and, forgive me if I’m making an obvious point here, but that doesn’t make him a straight man. If amount of sex that is being had is the standard we’re using to measure orientation and the curative powers of fundamentalist Christians, then I’m an ex-lesbian, and anyone who has known me for longer than half an hour will tell you that that’s just stupid.

I think the other thing to be clear about is that from what I gathered of his story, the ‘gay experience’, if you will, of the gentleman in question, was a stereotype in the sense that he was highly promiscuous and having an awful lot of casual sex, and the issue at hand is that he decided that he could not lead the lifestyle he was leading and be a Christian, and, okay, but there are straight people who do exactly that and there are gay people who do nothing like it at all. I was half-expecting this to be counteracted with, right, but for the last fifteen years I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with the man to whom I’m now married, who, by the way, is practically allergic to cameras and one of the least WAG-gy celebrity partners in the universe, so there’s a reasonable argument to be made here that sexual lifestyle and sexual orientation are not the same thing. I realise that 99% of the people who are reading this already knew that and are rolling their eyes at the fact that I felt the need to make such an obvious point, but, well, there do seem to be people in the world who have not quite made that connection yet.

3. John and Scott

The reason that wasn’t said, I think, is because the BBC were attempting to make that point without jumping up and down on it. I said that Scott was allergic to cameras – the most words I’ve ever heard him say out loud before was two years ago during Dancing On Ice, when he talked for two and a half minutes about the loveable twit in the Elvis costume and spent the whole time looking as though he was fighting the urge to run away. Now, in my opinion, if you live in the UK and you know who John Barrowman is but not that he’s both gay and taken, the part of the UK in which you live is underneath a very large rock, but I recognise that, being a fangirl type person, my opinion does not represent that of the wider universe. So one of the very first things they did last night was put Scott in the picture. Even if I had gone in without having any idea who he was or that he existed, even if there hadn’t been a kiss and an, “I love you,” on camera, I would have learned in the first ten minutes that this was a long-term relationship and that the BBC were pretty damn determined to make sure that I knew that. The old married couple bickering alone…

Scott: You’re flying into Toronto? No. Chicago?
John: *tries unsuccessfully not to laugh*
Scott: When are you coming back?
John: You get a schedule every week.
Scott: What, like I read it?

And from that I guess we come to my ulterior motive for including this section, which effectively boils down to that the two of them are so damn adorable it should be illegal.

Plus, most people I know don’t set their laptop wallpaper as a picture of their casual screw at the civil partnership they had together, because, really, the number of things that would be wrong with that sentence just boggles the mind.

It’s also important because of a review that was in the Metro paper this morning, which asked, why was he so afraid that he would be told he was really straight? After all, what difference would it make? He wouldn’t be able to be camp on stage anymore? Well, yes, I suspect his professional life might get more than a little awkward – not the camp quite so much as the what on earth would he talk about in interviews? – but it would make somewhat of a bigger difference than that, because if I were a gay man and I were faced with the possibility of having to go home to my husband and say, “Okay, yes, I’ve been sleeping with you for a decade and a half, and, yes, I married you, and, yes, I love you, and, yes, I fancy the pants off you and make more lewd remarks about our sex life to the press than you’re probably comfortable with, but apparently physiologically my brain likes women?” I might start having the smallest bit of an identity crisis. Which makes me think that the TV reviewer for Metro might have missed the point, a little.

4. Gender Non-Conformity

I spent half of Friday morning trying to decide whether I was gender non-conformist as a child. I owned dolls because I was a girl and therefore people bought them for me, but the only ones I ever liked were my Playmobiles, which aren’t even dolls in the traditional sense. I would have worn what we called my Prisoner Cell Block H dungarees until they were capable of walking to the washing machine under their own power if I’d been allowed, but I wore dresses to school because it was the uniform and dresses on the weekend because it would have been pointless to even try to win those fights… until I was about ten, when I distinctly remember having a tantrum because my mum insisted that I wear a blue denim dress with flowers on it and ribbons in my hair to go for lunch with the grandparents, and I still didn’t win that fight. I sulked all afternoon, but I wore the damn dress. I thought that playing House or Mummies and Daddies was the biggest waste of damn time ever invented. It’s not an either/or question, though, because I didn’t want to do what would traditionally have been considered boys’ activities, either. I was the kid who liked reading and crafts, and, while that doesn’t fit particularly neatly into either gender category, it’s more of a girl thing than it is a boy thing. I thought boys were stupid. I still do, a lot of the time – some of my best friends are guys but part of their reason for existing is definitely so that I can mock them, and that’s got more to do with common sense than it has with sexuality!

It’s also worth mentioning that irrespective of sexuality, and completely at odds with the kid on the video who was breaking things and grew up to be the butchiest of all the butch lesbians, gender non-conformity as a child does not mean that you’ll grow up to be a gender non-conformist as an adult. I could use myself as an example and say that even if you come down on the side of the fence that says I was a gender non-conformist and while I am by no means the girliest girl in the world, compared to her (and, for that matter, to the heterosexual mother of the twins!), I might as well be Charlotte from SATC. I may not do make-up or wear nail polish or have the compulsive female need to buy all the shoes there are, but I have long hair and wear jewellery and buy my clothes from the womens’ department and kind of like getting dressed up when there’s a reason for it. I could do that, but it’s more fun to use Barrowman as an example and say that he may well be the ultimate musical theatre geek and have a higher than normal-for-a-man obsession with bling, but he’s a petrolhead and he wants to be an action hero and he’s only properly camp when he’s actually trying to be!

I wrote a lot of that at work on Friday, before I heard the GMTV interview that JB did as a promotion for this show, which basically says exactly what I just tried to say and I fail to understand why some version of this sentence couldn't have made it to air.

"Yeah. I did, I did both things, I climbed trees and I played with dolls. I love cars, I collect cars, I love mechanical things. And that, a lot of people would say, is not typically what gay men like. So, yeah, it's going to break a lot of stereotypes."

Only, it didn't, or at least, not in that way, and if this is what he was saying less than 48 hours before it aired, I really would love to see the unedited footage, because there are parts of it that just reinforced the stereotypes.

Because, look, these identical twins that I briefly made reference to earlier. They're twelve years old, and one of them owns tanks and GI Joes and guns and typical 'boy stuff', and the other one owns Care Bears and My Little Pony and typical 'girl stuff', and, as their mom says, these kids have been raised together and treated the same and the toys they have are the ones they chose. Fine. I get that, I really do, and what we're saying is, it's something that is in them, it's got nothing to do with their environment, but isn't there a danger inherent to this that it will reinforce the belief that some people have that if you let your boy play with dolls, he will turn out gay, or if you let your girl play with trucks, she will turn out lesbian? It risks making people not let their kids choose, like by restricting them to typical gender roles they will be able to change the sexuality that, I'm going to say for the sake of argument, they were born with.

I think it should also be pointed out, because by bringing up gender non-conformity and then ignoring the issue, they've basically asked me to, that there isn't just a line in the sand between homosexuality and transgenderism, they are entirely different things, and to suggest that gender non-confirmity is suggestive of being gay but not suggestive of being transgendered, that's insulting to the LGB community and to the trans community both at the same time.

5. The Gay Gene

Having established that sexuality isn't a choice and that it's nature rather than nurture that determines it, the show moved on to finding out exactly which elements that we're exposed to either at conception or in utero decide on whether we turn out to be gay or straight -- the first test being to see whether John possesses a gay gene that may or may not exist.

Allow me first to explain a little bit about Mendelevian inheritance, specifically in terms of X and Y chromosomes.

There are 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human body. The twenty-third of these pairs is what determines whether we turn out to be genetically male or genetically female. Mom has XX and Dad has XY. All offspring inherit an X from Mom -- which X that might be is down to random chance. The thing that determines our gender at birth is which of Dad's chromosomes we inherit, if we get the X then we're female and if we get the Y then we're male, and this, too, is down to random chance. I think what they were trying to suggest, badly, is that a gay gene might be linked to the 23rd chromosome, the sex chromosome. If we take this to be true, then we can also say that the chromosome on which the gay gene is carried must come from Mom's X, and we can say this because all boys born to the same parents get the same Y chromosome from Dad and that would mean that the entirety of a male line would have the same sexuality and we know that not to be true. The theory, therefore, is that if Mom has a gay X chromosome and a straight X chromosome, the sexuality of her son is determined by which of them he ends up with.

There are several problems with this, not the least of which is that I'm fairly certain this theory was disproved about ten years ago.

The part that makes me bury my head in my knees and rock back and forth, just on the grounds of common sense, is that Sven, the geneticist who was running this test, claimed that if one brother got one of the X chromosomes, it would be highly unlikely that another brother would get the same X chromosome. This is flat out not true. The whole point of Mendelevian inheritance is that it's down to random chance. There are two chromosomes, your chances of getting one of them are therefore 50/50, the odds of this are not something you need to ask the ex-biomedical scientist in order to work out, these are odds that anyone in the local bookies would be able to tell you, and in no universe does a one in two chance translate to highly unlikely.

Then, when this was shown, we had already seen the bit of film with the twins. I will assume, because it's clearly the direction they wanted me to go in, that My Little Pony twin will grow up to be gay and that GI Joe twin will grow up to be straight. (Gah.) If you have monozygotic twins, which those two were, then they get exactly the same mixture of chromosomes, and, if sexuality is based entirely on genes, then it is not possible for one of a pair of monozygotic twins to be gay and another to be straight. This is part of the reason that I'm sure we disproved this theory -- there is not 100% concordance in sexuality in monoygotic twin studies. There are high levels of concordance, which means that there is likely to be a genetic element somewhere, but it isn't 100%, as these two may or may not grow up to prove, and that means that something else has to come in to play.

The final part is to do with the way genetics works, and I'm not a geneticist so bear with me, because this makes perfect sense in my head but I'm not sure I can express it very well. If the things that I know to be true about inherited characteristics that are linked to the X chromosome were taken to also be true for the way sexuality is inherited, then it would either be impossible for a straight man to produce a gay daughter and for a gay woman to produce a straight son, or it would be impossible for a straight woman to produce a gay son. This is biological law. This is proven. It has been proven many, many times over. It is based on, among other stuff, everything we know about haemophilia.

As it turns out, my indignation at the godawful science in this segment of the program is irrelevant, because the X chromosome John inherited from his mother is exactly the same as the X chromosome his straight brother Andrew inherited from their mother.

6. Uterine Hormones and Maternal Immunological Responses

The first thing to say is that, with these two theories, I got the impression that nobody really knew what they were talking about, so I don't know how much I'll be able to critique the science.

I can outline the theories as they were presented as best I can. The first is that male sexuality (at this point, I don't know if anyone is aware that lesbians exist, but I'll let it go on the grounds that the whole issue of the show is wrapped up in the personal story of a gay man and they do only have an hour, and, quite frankly, there's a limit to what they could say about it even if they wanted to because the scientific community tends to ignore the issue) is based on how much testosterone a person is exposed to in the womb. If you get a lot of testosterone, then you get traditionally masculine characteristics, which is true, and if you get less testosterone, you get traditionally feminine characteristics, which is also true. The part that I have issues with goes back to gender conformity and gender non-conformity, because the enormous leap that's taken here is to assume that being attracted to women is a masculine characteristic and being attracted to men is a feminine characteristic. One of the ways you can tell how much testosterone a person was exposed to in utero is by looking at their hands. If your ring finger is significantly longer than your index finger, you've got male hands, and if your index and ring fingers are basically the same size, you've got female hands.

John has got masculine hands and was therefore exposed to plenty of testosterone in the womb.

As I said, no lesbians, but can I just say that I nearly walked into a lamp post on Friday morning staring at my hands as I walked to work. It was suggested that this is an either/or thing, that you either get ring and index fingers of the same length or you get a longer ring finger, there are no other options. I have alien hands. I got a longer index finger.

The danger with this theory is that it is possible to detect how much testosterone a foetus is getting. If it's ever proven to be true, how long do you reckon before someone suggests that we test every pregnant woman for the amount of testosterone in utero and for the ones who we don't think are getting enough, we give them a whacking great injection of the stuff? I would bet on not that long.

The final suggestion was that a man's chances of being gay increase depending on the number of older brothers he has -- the mother mounts some kind of unspecified immunological response that increases every time she carries a male foetus, and this is what determines (again, male) sexuality. I can't comment on this at all, because, really, genuinely, it was never explained how this might work, except for the part where someone said, "If you think about it, in the mother's womb, a male foetus is almost like foreign tissue," and, no, sorry, let's just be clear about this for one minute. A male foetus is foreign tissue. Any foetus is foreign tissue! But, that's me nitpicking and we'll overlook it, because John's mother carried two boys before she was pregnant with him, and he's happy because finally he found a theory that applies to him.

7. The Bottom Line: Why I Care, and Why I Don’t Care

I believe that my sexuality is something I was born with and something that I can't change, and, for me, for where I am in my life now, I don't really need it to be validated, but I think it's something that probably should be.

I care about it so that the parents who want to know what they did wrong when they were raising their son might finally realise that they it wasn't anything they did or didn't do. I care about it so that when fundamentalists tell me that I'm going to hell, I can tell them that I am the woman that God made me and have something more than my nerve and my faith to back that up with. I care about it for the sixteen-year-old me who thought that she was wrong, so that she might never have had to doubt that she was right. I care about it for the government, for the Church, and for the world, so that their heads may no longer have an excuse for staying up their arses. I care about it for everyone whose sexuality has ever led them to find out that unconditional love isn't really unconditional.

So, in terms of the bigger picture, yes, this is something that does matter to me.

But there's a bottom line:

If someone came up with a safe, reliable, marketable pill tomorrow that would turn me straight, I wouldn’t take it.

I've said it before: my sexuality is not the most important thing about me, but it is a part of who I am and it turns out that I kind of like who I am. It took me a long time to get here, but this is me, warts and all. I wouldn't know how to be a heterosexualist anymore than I would know how to be an atheist or how to not want to be a doctor or how to not be a woman or how to... be French, and it's not that the people who are all of those things aren't valuable people, too, it's just that they're not me. I don't know what happened to determine that I was going to be born a girl who likes girls, I don't know whether that's something that will be learned within my lifetime, but what it comes down to is, it doesn't matter. It's not my job to figure out why I am any of the things that I am. It's my job to embrace those things, to not apologise for them, and to live every day of my life with everything that I am.

Rape, sexual assault, and the importance of learning that no means no.

2008-03-03T00:57:18Z

There was a column in the LA Times last weekend about the incidence of rape on college campuses:

What campus rape crisis?

To summarise, the oft-quoted one-in-four statistic regarding the number of women who are or will be victims of rape is inherently flawed because 'rape' can really mean 'one-night stand', and this is a result of promiscuity, alcohol, and the sexual liberation of women in the last fifty years. I should at this point mention that the column was written by a woman. I'd suggest reading the whole thing, but here is the paragraph that made me spit just a little harder than the others.

"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?" asks Alan D. Berkowitz, a campus rape consultant. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent, although Berkowitz apparently finds it "inherently ambiguous."

*gets out soapbox*

I carry a condom in my wallet, and I have done since first year undergrad.

I am a teetotal lesbian.

The probability of my ever having consensual penetrative intercourse is right up there with the probability of Sinatra ever staging a comeback. The probability of my ever getting drunk enough for a man to be able to claim that I gave 'tacit consent' is only slightly higher -- and this is a different rant, but since I'm on the subject and since it's a term that Ms. MacDonald seems fond of, there's no such thing as 'tacit consent'; if consent isn't clear and unambiguous, then it's not consent.

I carry a condom in my wallet because I live in the world, and because sexual assault is an ugly truth but it is a truth nevertheless, and because all the self-defence classes in the world don't change the fact that I'm five feet four and weigh 115 pounds. It doesn't mean that I'm promiscuous, it doesn't mean that I'm looking to hook up, it doesn't mean that I'm giving consent. It means that this is my body and I reserve the right to protect it from what I can for as long as I can by using whatever means necessary and expedient, and if to do that I have to provide a rapist with a condom, then that is what I'm prepared to do.

In which our heroine spends three hours locked in a TV studio with John Barrowman

2007-11-27T19:59:53Z

Now is probably an opportune time to point out my squeefulness over what I spent my morning doing and the fact that I really do think he's just a fantastic bloke does not in any way mean that I a) want to have sex with him, b) am 'a little bit bi', or c) 'like some men', all of which are things that I've been told I am in the last four days or so, and I'm just saying for the record that I can be a fangirl without wanting to get naked and sweaty with the people I go flaily squee over.

Having said that, I will now proceed to go flaily squee.

I've been awake since 6.30am and I came out of the BBC this afternoon into absolutely-pissing-it-down and got drenched and I've had a couple of hours up to my elbows in abdominal fat and small intestine, but I've spent my entire day walking around with the biggest, most idiotic grin on my face you could possibly imagine. At this point it's a toss-up who's going to get to me first, my anatomy group to throw me into the new mental health unit at Gartnavel (the glee with which I went into the DR this afternoon was probably disturbing if you didn't know the why of it) or sixpence1969 to stab my eyes out with sporks (at some point I decided that it would be a waste of a perfectly good opportunity if I didn't send her text messages to wind her up about where I was).

I had been sent about fifteen emails from Endemol and BBC Scotland telling me that my ticket did not guarantee me a seat and that I should please get there early if I wanted to be sure of getting in, so, since I know what I'm like, I showed up at Pacific Quay at 8.15am. For a 9.30am start. It turns out that I was guaranteed a seat, because, for reasons known only to themselves, my name was on the production list, but there are worse ways to spend a free hour than eating and drinking my licence fee's worth in pastries and coffee and watching the news. I was issued with a wristband, had my coat and bag spirited away from me, and sent into the studio and pointed at a seat. Right next to two women from Middlesbrough and in front of one from Gateshead, because it is just that small of a world.

The warm-up guy, Kevin, came out to... well, to warm us up. The Kids Are All Right is going to air on a Saturday night in prime-time, and we were a studio audience of 80 people who were very much in Tuesday morning mode. So, half nine on a Tuesday morning, we're all standing up and singing Is This The Way To Amarillo and clapping and cheering on cue. It was a bit of a shock to the system to walk out onto Pacific Quay afterwards and find that it really was still Tuesday.

And then Himself came in.

A couple of things worth mentioning:

He is a lovely, lovely man, and I'll get back to that.

He can turn absolutely anything into an innuendo. I know that this is not news, but it's a family oriented show and the sort of stuff he comes out with on Buzzcocks is not the sort of stuff that takes pre-watershed censors to their happy place, you know? When the BBC issued their press release back in October that he would be presenting this show, that was a source of concern for some people who have presumably never seen him in anything but Torchwood, and I rolled my eyes, but, anyway. He dials it down just enough and absolutely no further, and when he's off-air, he dials it riiiiiiight back up. There was a discussion about eating haggis off people...

Put him in the middle of Glasgow, and he is pure dead Glaswegian -- don't get excited or anything, he spent the breaks and the technical hitches and the long pauses yakking away to us and to the contestants in his Scottish accent, but he switched back to American for the show. He calls himself and his sister bidialectal, which he admits is a word that he made up but he thinks it should go in the OED nevertheless.

He chatted to us for a bit about the show and what was going to happen. I had only the vaguest possible idea of what it was about before he actually sat there and spelled it out, so I'll give you the potted version, but you gotta read it as though he's saying it. The format is nothing earth-shattering. It has a team of four adults and a team of seven really intelligent kids. The adults are trying to win money, and the kids are trying to keep them from winning money. ("What do the kids get?" "The satisfaction of knowing they're smarter than four grown-ups!") They spend the first part of the show building up the amount of money they have in the bank, which starts off with the £5000 that John gives them because he's nice like that, and in the second part, they have to eliminate all the kids before they get to take home what they've banked. If the kids eliminate all the adults, the adults go home with nothing. That's basically it. It's general knowledge and logic puzzles and memory tests. And, in the show with the adult team from Cardiff, which is the second one if they're showing them in the order they were filmed in, you get to play Spot The Sefkhet with the studio audience!

If you watch that episode, you'll see a thing when one of the girls from the adult team introduces herself, and he'll take the piss for a bit about a little birdie telling him that she has a theory about how the kids might have an advantage and win the show, and eventually she'll say that, yes, she does, because they're smaller and have shorter arms, there's less distance between their brain and the buzzer, so they can push it faster. I swear to God that wasn't scripted. He asked, off-air, if they were nervous, and she came out with this in the manner of someone whose brain has disengaged completely with their mouth, and he nearly peed his pants.

So, that's that.

But there were technical problems and by law the kids have to have a break every 45 minutes and one really, really, really long pause while the judges in the control room argued over whether they were or were not going to accept an answer as correct, and instead of buggering off, as he is entirely at his liberty to do, especially in the kids' breaks since they're going to last at least fifteen minutes no matter what, he just kept on nicking the floor manager's mic and wandering over to have a chat with us and taking the piss out of things, and this was where, among other things, there was the discussion about eating haggis off people. I know I'm going to get asked about that one. There was a woman who wanted to take John home and cook him haggis, and she blurted this out to Kevin during the warm-up, you know, as one does, and Kevin told John, and the woman said to him, "It's on me!", and, well, you can probably see where that degenerated to. :)

He told us about the chunk that's in his autobiography about when he was growing up in Glasgow. Every time he talks about his and his brothers and sisters relationships with either of his grandmothers, he has to use the word 'weans' (kids) and he said that they all realised that everyone in the universe who is not Scottish and does not live in Scotland would look at this word and make a face and it would come out something like 'wee-ahns', which he pronounced in the most appalling deep South accent I've ever heard, so they included a footnote. "Brains = replace 'b' with 'w', omit 'r'." He says that this footnote is the most laborious thing he's ever had to write in his life.

He loved Dancing On Ice, he would seriously consider Strictly Come Dancing if they asked him, but you would not catch him dead on I'm A Celebrity or Big Brother.

He's really looking forward to his tour. That was funny only to me and only because the woman who asked him is going to the show in Gateshead, and made a point of saying that it was Gateshead, and ever since the dates went up and I saw that they had him listed as performing in Newcastle at The Sage, I've been having fun imagining all the different colours the faces of the management at The Sage are turning. It's not in Newcastle, it's The Sage Gateshead, and, while I don't particularly care, I know that they do. I've performed at The Sage, several times, and you can't turn around backstage without coming nose-to-nose with one of their signs, all of which say, "Welcome to The Sage Gateshead. Tonight you will be performing at The Sage Gateshead. In all announcements and every time you mention the name of the venue on stage, you must refer to it as The Sage Gateshead." It's really the only thing Gateshead has going for it so they're a wee bit possessive, bless them.

I can lean out of my window and wave at him in his hotel, and I know this because he was talking about how he couldn't bloody believe the room they'd put him in -- it seems to be the fact that they've given him a dining room that is pushing the limits of his ability to comprehend it -- and forgot to censor himself when it came to the actual name of his hotel.

He had the new documentary about the Royal Family that's on BBC 1 on when he was in this stupidly large hotel room last night and nearly fell out of his seat when he was on it. "And in this ceremony," (he said in his best BBC English) "the Queen met many prominent Americans who make a contribution to British society, including politicians," (jazz hands) "er, normal people," (jazz hands) "and celebrities. And it was me! They had a picture of me!" And then he rang his mum in Florida to say, "Mum, I'm on telly with the Queen!"

He loves pie and beans, which he can't get in London, and black pudding, which he eats at breakfast on what they call their 'dirty Fridays' on the Torchwood set, and macaroon bars, which he also can't get in London.

He thinks that the best Joseph won Any Dream Will Do, but he still thinks that Keith had the best voice.

Although he learned an American accent out of self-defence when he was a kid in Illinois, he is enormously proud of being Scottish and he went to his high school prom in a kilt. In 1985. When Americans were still calling it a dress.

He has quite clearly never been told that a show when your audience is supposed to be clapping and cheering and laughing is not the best time to tell that audience a story in the middle of a break in that show that has every woman in the studio in floods of tears. He was asked what his favourite song from the new album is. He loves all of them, and he mentioned a few, including a song called Please Remember Me, which he put in for Scott. Three years ago, Scott's sister died of brain cancer, and the night before she died, she rang around the whole of her family to talk to them and to say goodbye, and, when she spoke to John, she asked him to remember her and to take care of her brother, and so that song is in there for him. And, yeah. Not a dry eye in the place.

He gets starstruck by politicians more than he does by celebrities, but he is not immune to getting starstruck by celebrities. Specifically, he's an enormous sci-fi geek and ran into George Lucas a couple of years ago at the Cannes Film Festival, upon which he promptly turned into a gibbering wreck, made a lot of noises that contained no actual constonants, ran away, and then turned around and, "like the idiot that I am", went back and asked if there was any chance he could have a photo. He says that the photo basically consists of him, with this huge insane grin and his arm around George Lucas and a general demeanour of 'look, it's my best friend, George!', and then George Lucas, with a general demeanour of 'GET ME AWAY FROM THE CRAZY PERSON!'. He also fancies Daniel Craig and, while he was not able to speak properly when he met him, it was not so much starstruckness as it was him being impeded by all the drool.

He did the noises that he made when he met George Lucas and Daniel Craig. I cannot reproduce them. I was nearly on the floor.

And, when he finished his George Lucas story and someone said, "so now you understand how we feel about you", he laughed and said that people shouldn't get starstruck over him, he's just a bloke and he shits and wipes his arse exactly the same way as anyone else.

Then we all left, and he stood there until every single person was gone from the studio and said goodbye to all of us as we went past him.

Lovely man, lovely day, I'm so glad I went, and when I find out when it airs, I'll let you know.

sefkhet @ 2007-10-23T20:12:00

2007-10-23T19:55:59Z

"Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit." -- Erik Erikson (1971)

I've been getting involved with the Glasgow arm of an organisation called the Teddy Bear Hospital, and the central aim of it is that medical students go out to primary schools within their local area and talk to children about going to see the doctor, and the children bring their teddy bears into school and tell the students about the teddy and the students examine the teddy, and, hopefully, this is the sort of thing that will make little kids less afraid of doctors and hospitals and all things medical. It's a good thing, and I say that speaking as someone who *was* a little kid who was *terrified* of doctors and hospitals and all things medical.

My own personal fear had a lot to do with that I never really knew anyone who went into hospital for something small; there were always machines and tubes and they never quite looked like what I was used to them looking like. Eventually, when I was nine and the fear was keeping me from seeing my dad, as I couldn't get any further than the lift, I got over it because someone took the time to sit down and explain things to me and make it all seem not quite so scary. And that was a big thing for me. It meant that I got to spend his last six months *with* him, not hovering outside the door of the ward.

So, in that respect, Teddy Bear Hospital is a thing worth doing well.

In Glasgow, one child in every ten is a victim of some kind of abuse.

The central aim of Teddy Bear Hospital is not to ferret out cases of abuse, but those statistics being what they are, the likelihood is that at some point everyone involved in it will come across at least one child who is being abused, and, if that happens, whether it's because a child has outright told us or because they've shown us something on their teddy or because there's something that just doesn't seem quite right and sets off a warning bell, it is our responsibility not as medical students but as fellow human beings to bring that to the attention of someone, and to that end, I've spent my night in child protection training.

So:

If you have children or nieces and nephews or godchildren or grandchildren, or children of friends, go right now and give them a hug and tell them that you love them.

I've heard some awful things tonight and seen some worse things, and it's left me a bit shaken up and feeling like I need to... I'm not sure, but like it's important, more so than usual, that the kids who are loved should know that they're loved. I'm going now to call my goddaughter and say goodnight and blow kisses down the phone and tell her I love her so very very much.

SGTE, SGTJ... and Albus Dumbledore

2007-10-20T20:58:15Z

I'm aware that I'm *massively* bucking fannish trends by talking about The West Wing today instead of Harry Potter*, and I'm making an informed decision to not give a damn.

In my fit of massive exhaustion last night, I came home and put SGTE, SGTJ in the DVD player and collapsed on the bed, I noticed this thing that I hadn't noticed before, and I giggled like a six-year-old over this bit in CJ's meeting with the Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality and felt the need to share the love.

Dr Huke: Salvatore Natoli of the National Council for Social Studies agues, 'In our society we unconsciously equate size with importance, and even power.'

The tiny little silent exchange between CJ and Josh after that line is priceless. It doesn't translate well to text, but, really, if you've never noticed it, go and watch. The facial expressions of Allison Janney and Brad Whitford are worth their weight in comedy gold.

*

The thing that I will say here about Harry Potter is that I've said most of what matters in other peoples' journals and the part that doesn't matter not only doesn't matter because it shouldn't matter, it doesn't matter because the UK media haven't given a crap about this in years. I assume we all remember that the BBC didn't care about having a same-sex couple on a family show at 8pm? In 1991? I was SIX. We may have some way to go before we reach that level of tolerance in society at large, but in books and on TV, we're good, and I doubt Dumbledore is going to make a great deal of difference one way or the other.

sefkhet @ 2007-10-18T17:07:00

2007-10-18T16:08:50Z

We broke a Guiness world record last night.

In one 24 hour period, more than 38 million people worldwide took part in Stand Up & Speak Out.

It feels a little bit good.

sefkhet @ 2007-10-09T21:20:00

2007-10-09T20:32:49Z

Having turned BBC 1 on for long enough to confirm that the rerun of Silent Witness *is* a rerun and not a new episode as my mum's newspaper is saying, is it just me or does Harry's DCI look like she's about fifteen?

Silent Witness

2007-09-25T21:55:23Z

Another series of Witless comes to its conclusion, and while this series finale was not quite the train wreck that last year's was, I'm going to open by saying that Greg Dinner should feel free to write the whole of Series 12. He should feel that freedom. Because if every episode in this series had been like Suffer The Children, I would be overjoyed, but they weren't.

Is it hypocritical of me to get so annoyed by Nikki's self-righteous indignation but yet rather like Harry's self-righteous indignation? Is it something to do with Harry's self-righteous indignation at least having leanings towards the actual practice of pathology while Nikki is doing more than Sam Ryan ever did to persuade me that she's actually a (quite bad) detective masquerading as pathologist for reasons known only to herself? Or should I just accept that I don't like Nikki and will therefore probably always be annoyed by her?

I'll try to unravel Nikki's case first, but I should mention that even if I'd been interested in it, I would likely have been distracted by the fact that James Potter was in it and in such a way that I kept on trying to wrap my head around the fact that someone his age plays a character who supposedly died in his early twenties, but, yes, different fandom, moving on.

It has to do with a girl who went missing eighteen months ago, the daughter of a senior police officer who was at the time the Guv'nor of the DI who is now investigating the finding of a body in the area that she went missing and who they assume to be her. It is all taking place in an area that seems to me to be a) rather too far out of London to be on their patch and b) way too far out of London for Nikki to be travelling back and forth between the two the way she does. There are markings on the bone of one of her femurs that suggest that she is not the person they think she is, and after bumbling around that for a bit, they work out that there are actually two bodies, the girl and her friend, who died three months before she did. The police are insistent that they were killed by someone who Nikki manages to scientifically prove did not kill them, and storms into a strip joint to slam her lab results down in front of them and prove that, who is charged with murder and released on bail and then kills himself, only not, in spite of him having been depressed, the brother of the first girl kills him and then makes it look like suicide. Nikki's scientific evidence for that involves tying Harry up with a piece of rope. The first girl was pregnant and her father threatened to kick her out of the house. The second girl was a traveller, which I believe is the PC word for gypsy, and was kicked off her site. Nikki somehow comes to the conclusion that her DI killed them and goes to James Potter, who is the travellers' solicitor, for help, only then realises that actually James Potter did the killing and very nearly gets dead herself but the cavalry come, unfortunately.

Oh, Sad Mouse.

Maybe it's just me, but if I were in a house with a man I knew had killed two girls and I had the foresight to climb out of his window and hide, I can't help thinking that I would try to hide somewhere other than IN HIS SHED, as that seems to defeat the point somewhat.

And at some point in the middle of all of that it seems that she is under the impression that Leo is working for her, rather than the other way around.

It was made very clear to us that Nikki's case was the A plot this week and Harry's case was the B plot, but Harry's case was far more interesting and I have more notes on it and it was where my Harry/Leo moments were to be found, and, most importantly, it actually made sense.

Harry is pulled off Nikki's investigation to look into a case the lab's been given by a woman (Anita) whose mother's (Roopa) life insurance is refusing to pay out as they claim that she died when she got into an accident while drunk. Anita is played by the woman who played Parminder Nagra's sister in Bend It Like Beckham, and for some reason I thought it was important that you all should know that. Roopa didn't drink. Harry believes that her blood alcohol level may have had something to do with the fermentation that occurred when four days elapsed between her death and her first PM and that her head trauma was incurred because of either a psychological or pathological mental condition. After staining for absolutely everything he can think of, he gets a positive result for variant CJD. The insurance company still refuses to pay out because on her declaration she said that she had only had one medical procedure, an appendectomy at a hospital with anti-CJD measures, and never ate meat, so she cannot have got CJD in spite of Harry having empirical proof that she *had* CJD. Anita pulls some information off the internet that she thinks is proof that her mother could have got CJD from working in a munitions factory, and so begins the scene(s) where I decide that Dr Harry Cunningham and Dr Gregory House would get on like a house on fire.

When Anita complains that Harry won't even go to see the scientist who wrote the article about munitions: "Well, he's not actually a scientist, he's a loony." That is possibly the best line ever.

And then when Harry goes back to the lab and says to Leo: "I know I've said this to you before but I really do believe that she is the most moronic, obstinate, bone-headed person I've ever had to work with." [...] "I've requested every detail on every single CJD case in this country since 1989. It may be that I have been hired by an idiot, but I still refuse to let some insurance stiff think he got the better of me."

In the course of his research, Harry discovers that Roopa was in an accident in a remote region of India and received blood from the hospital there, and that batches of CJD infected blood were exported from Britain to India. He enlists the help of a friend of Nikki's from the Department of Health in finding out whether Roopa's batch was infected, which he claims it was not, but not until after Harry's already told Anita to reject the 30% payout she's been offered, and it would probably have been helpful for him to know before that that Nikki wouldn't trust the friend as far as she could throw him. So he tries to track down the person who donated the blood, and manages to after a few false starts ("I'm conducting research into people who've donated blood in the last ten years. He hasn't? Are you sure? Oh, he's three.") only to find out that the blood donor is dead, and cremated, and his ashes have been scattered across a racing track in King's Lynn. This is a dead end until he tracks down the MRI that was taken from the donor when he was in the accident that kills him and finds classic CJD aetiology in his brain. The solicitor still refuses to pay out. Harry says that he'll exhume the bodies of the other nine people who he donated blood to and prove that they had CJD -- which their pathology suggests they did but he needs their actual blood to prove it. For some reason that I'm not picking up on, Harry won't be allowed access to their bodies, so he goes to see the one remaining living recipient instead. In the event, though, the man seemed in good health and content and Harry couldn't bring himself to tell him, so he didn't, but the solicitor pays out anyway for reasons that are not made known to us, or the family, or Harry.

Nikki goes away to do things with bones and leaves Harry and Leo -- who had been having a sweet moment before she came and interrupted -- to smile and hug Anita and her father.

For all they don't get much together this week, Harry and Leo are lovely when they are on-screen at the same time, with Leo palming the insurance case off on him and then them getting excited together over lab findings. There's a scene when they're in the lab mulling over Nikki's case without her there and I feel rather cheated that we didn't get to see the whole thing, and ditto for the scene we're told happened in which Harry told him that Anita was the most moronic, obstinate, bone-headed person he's ever had to work with before he repeated it on-screen. The nicest part is when Harry's doing his initial autopsy on Roopa and Leo's watching him from the peanut gallery, they talk through the glass and he finally gets Leo so interested that he opens the glass to come and have a look for himself. The thing I like about these two, as opposed to everything I don't like about Harry/Nikki, was illustrated well in this episode, and it goes back to something Harry said earlier in the series: "We haven't always agreed with each other, God knows we haven't, but we have always made room for each other's opinions." It was made clear here that much as they might disagree professionally, they do it entirely without rancour and never make it personal, and that right there is a lesson that Sad Mouse would do well to learn.

Silent Witness

2007-09-20T11:53:09Z

This is the episode that's All About Nikki, presumably because she didn't get much to do last week what with getting herself knocked out and landed in hospital. Sigh. I have a lot of not especially polite comments to make, but I'll try to get a basic plot summary down without editorialising before I, y'know, go off on one.

A bit over four years ago, Nikki investigated the death of a woman, Paula, who was murdered when a young girl, Anna, dared her boyfriend to kill the next person they saw. She was the lead pathologist on the case and presented evidence for the defence, saying that Anna did not have anything to do with the murder and that she was standing with Paula's children when Paula was stabbed. This was all based on blood spatter. Anna was sentenced to four years in prison and has now been involved in a car crash with her witness protection officer, she's died and the officer has been badly burned and in a coma. It doesn't take long for them to figure out that Anna was actually stabbed and that the car crash happened afterwards. Part of the reason that the jury didn't convict Anna of murder, besides the blood spatter, was that she had no interest in knives and would have had no reason to be carrying one, and then evidence comes to light during the new investigation that she actually self-harmed as a child. Leo begins to doubt Nikki's original evidence and Nikki begins to have an existential crisis. It is believed by the police that Paula's husband may have had something to do with Anna's death, and it comes out that he actually went to Anna's safe house and began to make overtures towards having sex with her but that didn't happen, and then the witness protection officer got back and he hid upstairs, where he heard the stabbing but did not see it. Harry is called to a crime scene with two women buried in an elderly couple's garden, and, based on the pattern of stab wounds and a positive ID by one half of the elderly couple who is in her nineties at least, establishes that the man who killed Paula also killed them, and on the presence of blowflies on the body, establishes that these murders took place before Anna met him, confirming Nikki's theory that Anna had nothing to do with Paula's death. She was going to be his next victim and so out of fear she tried to turn it into a game. It turns out, and this is to do with a bite by a Doberman when Anna was small, that actually the witness protection officer was stabbed and died and that the woman in the coma is Anna. The mistake was made because Anna had given her officer her St Christopher for looking after her, and the officer had given Anna her coat. Anna was never the target. The witness protection officer had cheated on her husband in the past, had given her husband the address of the safe house in a misguided attempt to prove that he could trust her, and he had turned up in time to see Jason going inside, assumed that his wife was having an affair, and killed her.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, Pa Alexander wants Nikki to do a second post-mortem on a friend of his who allegedly died of meningitis. She refuses to do it because of the personal involvement and gives him some names instead, but he runs into Harry and asks him to do it. Harry agrees, thinking that he's been referred by Nikki. The 'friend' is Pa Alexander's second wife, who Nikki did not know existed and who is younger than Nikki. The coroner reported death of natural causes from meningitis, after a great deal of angsting it turns out that, yes, she did, but it was precipitated by her being knocked off her bike by a bus and sustaining a hairline fracture to the skull. In the weeks before her death, she had a runny nose which was not so much a runny nose as it was seepage of cerebrospinal fluid, and this caused the meningitis which eventually caused death. Nikki does not get on with her father, he abandoned her and her mother in South Africa when she was eleven, and after this, she probably gets on even less well with him, as she started to open up to him about her existential crisis and then he went to the pub and told a reporter all about it and she ended up on the front page of the Metro paper.

Right.

First, the Harry/Leo.

I missed the good bit, at the end, which means that I have one thing, from right at the beginning before and just after Nikki arrived in the lab from the original crime scene. The comment I have in my notes is, "Harry and Leo are in the lab together looking all gorgeous and personal and acting as one being. Yes, I'm stretching. No, I do not care." Tom Ward made a comment in an interview he did for BBCi -- the same one where he said that he didn't think Nikki and Harry would ever happen -- in which he said that Harry's come a long way professionally from when he first entered the show and that even though Leo is technically the head of the department and therefore technically his boss, Harry and Leo behave as equals these days, and that's been one of the things about this series that's been so thoroughly lovely. It's illustrated in scenes like this one.

There were a few nice Harry bits on his own. I'm so glad he didn't go to America to take the research position he was offered at the end of the last series, because as is shown in his initial scene with Pa Alexander, he has far too good a bedside manner to be wasted in a lab. Continuing along the same lines, I thought it was excellent the way he was clearly annoyed with Pa Alexander for a number of things but that he was still determined to do his job and do it well, because this is Harry as we know him, except when the dead people are ex-girlfriends and he gets drunk and interrogates their parents, but that's a hangover from the last series that I'm still not over. I have praise for continuity, the bit with the blowflies, which is continued from an episode *years* ago, when Sam was still in it, when he did his entomologist thing and got an accurate time of death from larvae, and, as we all know, I love Harry when he's being science geek, because he is what Scott will be in a few years time. I also have enormous amounts of love for how he just doesn't get that other people might find dead bodies more than a little bit disgusting and how matter of fact he is with his DC throwing up on the mortuary floor.

I have great love for Leo, because out of Handsome Cop and Annoying Cop and Sad Mouse, he's the only one who talks any sense. He threatens to kick Annoying Cop out of the pit when he starts slagging Nikki's professionalism off -- and then Nikki gets annoyed with him for defending her, which is the first in the six degrees of WTF? He takes issue with her existential crisis and points out that she's putting her career on the line, and, while I have no problems with that, I don't see why she doesn't and neither does he. When she starts going on about it having been her who got Anna off, he tells her that she thinks she's more important than she really is, which I've been waiting for someone to say for years. When they find out that they got Anna and Witness Protection Officer's identities the wrong way around, when Nikki is busy having the warm fuzzies about it, he is less with the warm fuzzies and more with the not being able to believe he's got to tell the coroner, because yes. And, when Pa Alexander runs to the Metro paper with Nikki's existential crisis and Leo's looking for her and Harry says that she's at Anna's cremation, Leo says, "why, for God's sake?" and it's the most sensible thing anyone's said in the whole episode.

It was at the point when Leo was talking about Nikki thinking she's more important than she really is that I started to think that maybe Anna was the one who was still alive, just so we're all aware that I got the big climactic moment forty minutes before they all did.

A point of continuity: Anna had been out of jail for a few months before this all happened, she'd been inside for four years before that, and, given my admittedly scanty knowledge of how long these things take to come to trial, the murder took place, what, nine months before that? I feel like I can be secure in my decision that all the events that are being described were at least five years ago. It's bloody difficult for Nikki to have been the lead pathologist on the investigation considering that she's only worked there for three! Five years ago she was doing anthropological digs in the Brecon Beacons!

Right, let's talk about procedure and common sense.

The minor things are that Nikki should not be doing interrogations, but I'll let that go because it's not the first time and I doubt it'll be the last; that pathologists are not SOCOs, and I have plenty of patience with the idea that they are when it gets me a scene with Harry and Leo spending all night bagging and tagging everything in existence in which it's *acknowledged* that they don't have to do what they're doing than I am with a scene with Leo and Nikki and Annoying Cop and Handsome Cop when it's inferred that it's part of their job description; that the Metro paper has a print deadline that I strongly doubt Pa Alexander could have made; and that DCs are not supposed to be running their own cases so why is Vomiting DC the SIO on Harry's case?

The thing where my brain exploded is that PATHOLOGISTS DO NOT GIVE EVIDENCE FOR THE DEFENCE! Their job is completely tied up with impartiality. Pathologists are expert witnesses whose job it is to present the evidence as it was and all possible theories about how it might or might not have got there. They are not supposed to attempt to sway the jury, they are not supposed to act on behalf of a defence lawyer or a prosecution lawyer, they are not supposed to make a decision of guilt or innocence, and supposing they were to do any of those things then the Home Office would have every right to decertify them. They do not give evidence for the defence. They do not give evidence for the prosecution. They give evidence. Period.

Apparently next week it's going to be all about Nikki, too.

The One Where It's All About Nikki

2007-09-20T00:40:51Z

I am writing a real review of Double Dare, hoping that all I missed in the last five minutes after my tape cut out was a disgustingly nauseating scene between Nikki and Dad and/or Nikki and Harry that frankly I can live without having seen anyway. I have issues with correct police procedure and timelines that I need to yelp about.

The last thing on my television screen was a graveyard, shortly after Leo flailed about what he was going to tell the coroner, just in case I did miss anything important...

Anyway, until I get round to organising my notes into some sort of coherent format, which will be tomorrow morning now, I'm providing a link to the blog of Alison Graham at the Radio Times, who sums up all my issues with the sainted Nikki Alexander into an article far more pithy than I could ever write.

FIC: Tin Man (The State Within, unfinished WIP)

2007-09-13T23:14:38Z

I'm kind of piggybacking onto alaira's WIP meme here, because I was clearing out my hard drive at work this afternoon and I found this, and it's been nearly a year and so I'm not in the slighest bit convinced that I'll ever finish it. For now, this is what I have, mostly written on the back of a training manual in Starbucks in the middle of the original series run, set in the last ten minutes or so of episode 5, a point that would have become more clear had it not stalled when it did.

Title: Tin Man
Fandom: The State Within (Nicholas/Christopher, unrequited Nicholas/Mark)
Rating: R
Warnings: Semi-explicit sexual references. Not much worse than the ones that actually made it to air.
Summary: He never, ever got involved.

Once upon a time, Nicholas Brocklehurst was the golden boy of MI-6.

He was the middle son of Sir Henry Brocklehurst. His education was impeccable, with eleven years at Eton and a starred First in international law and politics from Cambridge. He had been decorated by Her Majesty's armed services for courage under fire. He wasn't pompous enough to lust after the House of Lords for himself, but he carried his arrogance like a birthright that let him orbit through the people who did as though he belonged there anyway. His idealism was kept carefully buried under layers of upper crust English propriety. His reputation was that of an insubordinate rule-breaker with a penchant for pulling off the impossible.

Until Iraq.

(He sees things in his nightmares that would have Marines turning on all the lights.)

Assignment to Washington was supposed to be a pissant political mission, and Mark Brydon a living embodiment of the establishment he'd spent his childhood scorning and his entire adult life shunning. It came with prestige and power, a position that a hundred men in the diplomatic corps would have killed for, but for a man who'd spent his career infilitrating enemy camps in the desert, it was a less than subtle punishment for the fuck up that had cost three men their lives. When he'd accepted the file, it had been with barely concealed disdain, so occupied with mentally jabbing pins into Sir Mark's smirk that he'd left himself completely unprepared for Mark.

Mark who had a casual disregard for his own importance, a less casual impatience with what he saw as the pointless trappings of his office. Who strode through the Embassy as if he owned the place, but thought nothing of answering his own phone when it rang. Who had demons that Nicholas couldn't bring himself to ask about. Who was intelligent and principled, and oozed authority and confidence from his pores. Nicholas could go back into the office in the small hours of the morning and find Mark still there, the top button of his shirt undone and his tie pulled loose, his neck marred by a day's growth of scruffy beard but still long and pale and deliciously biteable.

It was by no means the first time or even the hundredth time that he'd looked at a colleague and entertained the odd idle fantasy about what they might be like to fuck.

It was lust. It was normal, it was safe, it was something to keep his right hand company on cold nights. Nicholas didn't remember when it was that he'd first thought about pushing Mark's shirt to one side and bending his head just a little to suck on the skin stretched taut over his collar bone, or the first time he'd eyed the way Mark's arse curved inside his jeans with something a little more than aesthetic appreciation, and sometimes he wondered, perversely, if Mark would be disappointed by that, supposing Nicholas ever got blitzed enough to tell him. Sometimes he wondered how much more blitzed he would have to be before he told Mark the things that he did remember. He remembered the thirty-ninth hour of a day that had started at four o'clock on Sunday morning and was stretching out with no end in sight, a malfunctioning coffeemaker and Mark's quest to find a tie that wasn't giving off steam. One minute, Nicholas had been talking about opposition in Whitehall, and the next minute he'd caught a flash of navy silk around Mark's wrists and his stomach was bottoming out as he struggled to remember the end of the sentence.

There isn't enough Scotch in the world to make him give that one up, even if he were in the sort of job that let him get drunk enough to lose control like that, which he wasn't, and which he didn't, not ever. Then again, he hadn't fallen for his protectees -- didn't fall for anyone, because that way lay gray areas and compromises that he could do without -- until he met Mark Brydon. And he didn't bottom, wouldn't do it, not in this lifetime or any other, but he would have gone on his knees for Mark without even needing to be asked.

(Behind the black of his own eyelids that night, the next night, whatever night it was that Crisis of the Week had finally levelled off and they'd all gone home to get some sleep, he'd watched Mark wrap that tie around his wrists, felt short nails scrape over his inner thighs, across his nipples, down his hipbone, seen himself roll over and spread his legs, and he'd come like a rocket.)

And that was that.

Never mind that Mark never gave the minutest sign of being interested.

Or that Nicholas wouldn't have let something as transitory as sex compromise Sir Mark even if Mark had been outright groping him in briefings.

He'd let his barriers down for the first time since -- for the first time in a long, long time, and getting them back up had turned out to be a lost cause in the face of that look in Mark's eyes when he wanted to save the world or die trying.

So when the Army sent Thomas Warner home from Afghanistan in a coffin, when Bush won a second term, when Lynne Warner was appointed Secretary of Defence, when Nicholas received instructions to mark her Undersecretary, Christopher became a distraction from his distraction.

He doesn't know what Christopher would have thought if he'd known that.

He'd seduced him because it was the politically expedient thing to do. The professionally expedient thing to do, too; the information he'd got out of Christopher as his lover had been far more impressive than anything he might have got as a drinking buddy or as part of a pseudo-bitch fest of Washington power brokers, and it wasn't as though he'd been difficult to seduce. He stayed with him because it was still the politically expedient thing to do, because it was a position that nobody conceded once they had it. Because Christopher was attractive and good in bed. Because his fingers tangled with Nicholas's in the sheets, and when Nicholas's mouth reached blindly for contact, his tongue slipped inside, and it had been long enough since the last time those things were real and not figments of his imagination that Nicholas was willing to take what he could get. Because he was there, and he'd become familiar. Easy.

Because there came a time when Nicholas could no longer remember what it was like to not have him there, and if there were nights that he closed his eyes and looked into another man's as he came inside Christopher, that was just another part of the package.

There had been moments when he'd almost been able to convince himself that they were a normal couple. Letting himself into Christopher's apartment and locking the door behind him, stealing quick kisses and straightening ties as one or the other of them left for work in the still-dark hours of Washington's early mornings, waking up with his nose buried in Christopher's neck and no disasters to avert. (Yet.) A handful of memories scattered across the vista of the last two years, times when Nicholas had believed in the art of the possible, would have continued to believe in it but for the spectre of real life always looming close behind them. He had learned how Christopher took his coffee, white and sweet, wrinkling his nose at Nicholas's own credo of black and hot and as strong as possible; and how comfortable his deceptively soft looking couch was to sleep on, which was to say not and about as comfortable as spending the night concertinaed into an aeroplane seat; and what the contours of his tongue felt like when they pushed past Nicholas's sphincter, both exactly the same as and completely different to every other time it had been any other man. It could never be normality, had been closeted in secrets and lies ever since they'd met, an inaugural ball and two glasses of champagne and Nicholas noticing that Christopher was more interested in the shapes his mouth was making than the words that were coming out of it.

It was a brick wall that they'd become extraordinarily good at keeping in place, something to disguise how little they really know of each other, the important things, anyway.

Nicholas had never learned for sure what the nature of Christopher's attachment to Lynne is. Filial, he thinks. (He hopes.) Trying to be the son that Thomas Warner had been, failing absolutely and constantly but always, always going back for more. And for his part, he hadn't laid himself bare to the man convention would call his lover. Scars that Christopher's fingers traced across in the dead of night, those nightmares that would have Marines turning on all the lights, everything with a story behind it that Nicholas wouldn't have discussed even if Christopher had asked. What his family really think of him, why his mouth tightened at the corners whenever they come up. An attachment to his boss that could never have been written off as filial even if the laws of biology and logic hadn't intervened.

Some mornings, Nicholas was caught off-guard by the thought that it was like sharing breakfast with a complete stranger, jolted by the intensity of that.

Silent Witness: Suffer the Children

2007-09-04T22:50:37Z

That was one of the best and the most profoundly disturbing episodes they've done in a very long time.

I'll begin with a non-spoilery comment: why is it that every time I turn my television on lately, Martha Jones's mum seems to be on it? It's like she's becoming my female Alan Dale.

Is it possible to be beyond freaked out at what was going on in that school thirty years ago and at the same time not at all surprised? I can't help sometimes but think that to be a Christian is to accuse everyone else in the world of moral bankruptcy while having free licence to *be* morally bankrupt -- to ignore the part of scripture that says we should take the log out of our own eye before we accuse other people of having specks in theirs. And then I remember that I am one and that I'm not like that and that I hope the majority of us are not like that, but at the same time I remember why it sometimes feels like to be a non-ultra conservative, sane, *normal* Christian is fighting a war on two fronts, on the one side trying to convince people that we're not all batshit insane and we have no interest in converting them but we believe what we believe and it is nobody else's business and likewise it is none of our business what other people believe unless they choose to tell us and if they do choose to do so we are not about to damn them to hell, and, on the other side, against the faction of Christians who seem to spend every day doing their level best to persuade non-Christians that we are indeed all batshit insane and are going to convert them or else damn them to eternal pits of fire. I hadn't heard of the Vatican law invoked in Suffer the Children, but I thought that they wouldn't make something like that up, it's too easy to check, and I have and it exists. It isn't referenced under its Latin name anywhere that I can find, but that date and the description are accurate. This is the law that states that in cases of sexual crime, what the Catholic church believe to be the worst crimes, it should be reported to the Vatican and that they will undertake their own investigation. It goes nowhere else. It is not considered a matter for the police. It is the point of ecclesiastical law that allows four young men to gang rape a ten-year-old and get away with it. It can be punished by excommunication, the highest power the Vatican has, but, as the point was made tonight, even if excommunication occurs, that doesn't stop the perpetrators from doing it again. After all, if a Catholic is excommunicated, they believe that they'll burn in the eternal pits of fire anyway, so what have they got to lose by repeating their original crime?

So, that's the first part that makes it profoundly disturbing.

I'll come to the second part in a minute, but before I do, a related point: it is possible to be a woman of science and a woman of faith both at the same time. That was a point well made by Martha Jones's mum whose character's name I cannot remember, and she would've been my new hero, but of course it turned out that as well as being a woman of science and a woman of faith, she was also a woman of extreme moral bankruptcy.

I will leave aside the fact that Silent Witness has done a story on human organ trafficking and specifically human kidney trafficking before, four years ago. It was in the episode that really started the whole Harry/Leo thing off for me, when they weren't working properly with Nikki yet and they were taking walks in what I assume was Hyde Park and exchanging little glances and Leo managed to be both jealous!boyfriend and proud!boyfriend at the same time, and all of that is part of the reason that we will leave it aside. (We will ignore Theresa, to whom Leo was still married at the time, because the BBC forgot that for great chunks of series so I can too.) The other reason we will leave it aside is because I can buy that that case was the reason his mind went to kidney trafficking in the first place. And because they did this one so damn well.

I do not wince at much on this show anymore, but the kid who had been practically tenderised with the meat cleaver, yes, I winced at that. Leo's disgust at Nikki's suggestion that they 'give' the boy a name was, in my opinion, entirely appropriate. I've danced the fandango all over the transplantation issue both here and elsewhere. I believe in presumed consent, I believe in the right of a donor to make that choice without worrying about whether their next-of-kin agrees or not, I believe that number of people who die because they need an organ transplant and are unable to get one should be a whole hell of a lot lower than it is now. I do not believe that this is the way to go about it. I've seen a lot in the media about my position recently. We all know what my feelings on Die Grote Donorshow were. I read a book recently, something that runs in the same vein as The Handmaid's Tale, about human cloning, children who were cloned and allowed to grow up and live lives and have friends and then, when they reached their twenties, had their organs taken from them one by one and died, because that was what they had been created for and most people believed that they had no souls and therefore did not matter -- people who've read it will know which book I'm talking about, but I assume there are people who haven't and I don't want to ruin it for them if they ever do. And tonight, the exploitation of poor families into selling their children's kidneys for money because someone decided that it is possible to put a price on a human life. However desperate we get, however much some days it feels like medical science is stalling and too many people are dying, there are some lines that shouldn't be crossed, and those are three of them. And, yes, I have lost someone because they needed an organ transplant and couldn't get one, so I am qualified to make that call. I wouldn't have wanted it to happen that way and neither would he.

The last episode they did on this, I actually felt some sympathy for the orchestrator of it. She was doing it in memory of her little brother who hadn't been able to get a kidney transplant. It's difficult to feel sympathy for a character who believes of her donors that, "They didn't have names. I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. [...] They're scum. They're not people. They're no one."

I also wanted to talk a bit about grief, about Leo's grief. Part of the reason that this was such a good episode was that it was Leo's episode. It's been a while since they had one of those, and he frequently gets stuck playing the support to Harry and Nikki. I'm glad they haven't forgotten about Theresa and Cassie. I know that there'll have been a lot of eye-rolling at it, but I think it's nice that he still sees Cassie. She's his daughter, and she'll always be his daughter, and that's a wound that becomes scar tissue, eventually, not the great raw throbbing gash, but it never goes away. I imagine that talking to Cassie must have brought him a great deal of comfort over the past two years, and, honestly, who the hell are any of us to dictate how he handles his grief?

The shallow: I assume everyone heard the two points that I did the squeeing like a dolphin thing. There was the gorgeous scene at the start, when Harry knew that Leo had been off that morning and also clearly knew *why* he was off that morning, and Leo's defence of Harry's abilities to the Simon The DI and his assurance to Harry that it isn't about him. Then there was the scene in Part 2, when they went off in Harry's car together. I got terribly squeeful about them being partners in crime together, and having a car chase (which turned out to be less of a chase and more of a gliding round a corner but in my defence I didn't know that at the time), and totally ignoring protocol and going off to be SOCOs together all night. Forensic pathologists are not qualified to be forensic scene of crime officers, but if the Home Office can ignore that, then why the hell should I care? Leo also broke my heart into tiny little pieces during his plea at the committee meeting, and I would have given my eye-teeth for the camera to follow him walking back to Harry and the hug or the shoulder pat or walking back to the car together in silence. It would have been very Nicholas and Mark leaving the mortuary after James Sinclair died, I feel. Actually, I would've given my eye-teeth for Harry to get Leo outside the community centre and then give him a kiss and shove him in the car, but I'm not totally deluded, not yet.

I need a Witless icon. Sadly, Emilia Fox tends to be in the middle of Tom Ward and Will Gaminara in every promo shot that exists, which would seem to rule out the easy option.

I'm dreading next week. Nikki's life is in danger. Again. On the one hand, I would assume that that would mean she can't be in it that much, although I've been proved wrong about that in the past. On the other hand, Harry will get all angsty and lovelorn and I might vomit.

Witless Silence

2007-08-30T22:41:34Z

I have three good things to say about Nikki and I'll get them over with now because the fit of charitableness might cause me to break out in hives: the wardrobe has improved spectacularly, it is nice to see her doing facial reconstruction again, and I applauded when they remembered that she's a forensic anthropologist.

Leo and Harry had a conversation in the pub, once, because back when they were both more junior than either of them are now and Sam was head of department, you can imagine that Amanda Burton's particular brand of self-righteous pissiness would frequently have led to her staff saying bugger it and going for a beer. Anyway, the relevant part of that conversation, during which they talked about why they'd wanted to be doctors, is that this is when we found out that Harry's dad was a cardiac surgeon. Between that and having a heart murmur, it's really not that surprising he ended up doing what he does.

Harry is such a boy sometimes. :)

I'm disproportionately amused by their utter refusal to acknowledge that it's UCL, like introducing Leo as head of pathology at UCL would undermine the authority of his real-life counterpart.

I can't decide if I'm supposed to be reading something into the fact that Leo seems to be spending his evenings off playing poker -- is he back on the slippery slope that he briefly got onto when his wife and daughter died a few years ago, or are the BBC trying to prove that he's not a sad and lonely old man, or did they need two lots of fifteen second filler and we'll never hear of it again? I love the Beeb but I don't have a great deal of faith in their ability to show continuity.

Harry shattered my heart into a million pieces first when he went crawling into the wreckage, and then when he was trying to resuscitate the pilot and finally holding the pilot in his arms, knowing that he was dead but not able to leave him just yet, and, afterwards, standing in the middle of it all looking like the last survivor in a war zone.

Leo: Do you go around at the weekends looking for things to happen?

A number of things happened in the gap between Tuesday night and Wednesday night that left me a little confused, most notably that a board of enquiry was convened by the RAF and that either Harry put himself on leave or Leo put him on leave. Nikki keeps on insisting that he was 'in shock' -- technically, he wasn't, and she of all people should be using that term correctly.

The long scene that I got excited and slashy about while I was watching it on mute last night lived up to my expectations, not least because it started with Harry gently taking the piss out of Leo and Leo rolling his eyes at Harry, closely followed by the line about 'we haven't always agreed with each other, God knows we haven't', and all capped off by the bit that I didn't even see, when Leo, having argued with everything he said and listed a dozen good reasons why it wasn't a good idea, went off and did what he wanted him to do anyway. Aw.

I had no idea an aorta could rupture as badly as all that, but I do like hearing words like ELISA and knowing what they mean. My inner biomedical scientist doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

sefkhet @ 2007-08-29T21:35:00

2007-08-29T20:43:32Z

Not for nothing, but if the BBC want me to not slash people, then they need to not have those same people have a five minute scene in which they follow one another through labs and into offices and apparently into some room where they both change clothes and back into offices all without ever breaking the conversation, fail to observe any sort of personal space, and have one of them not even look at the annoying woman who is supposed to be his love interest when she finally enters the scene.

I have Witless on mute, comments about the actual episode to follow when I've seen the second part properly (i.e., with the sound on) and edited my notes to remove words like 'a-squee'.

sefkhet @ 2007-08-15T21:52:00

2007-08-15T21:23:49Z

I want to wish a lot of love and enormous amount of luck to each and every person who is waiting for their A-level results to be released tomorrow morning.

I want to tell the people who get the results they want that they should ignore the claims that will be on the front page of every paper tomorrow morning that education is being dumbed down in this country, because this is not the time for that. You deserve this happiness. This is the time for you to scream loud enough for them to hear you in the next county, to hug your friends and family, to celebrate, and to take this moment to be really bloody proud of yourselves. This is the time for your country to say to you, congratulations, you did it.

I want to tell the people who maybe did not quite get what they wanted that it is not the end of the world. I know it's going to feel like it -- really, I do, with bells on -- and that quite possibly for many of you the only thing you'll want to do is curl up and have a good cry. I'm strongly in favour of having a good cry. It helps. But, once you've done that, you have to remember that neither your life nor your career begin and end with your A-level results. I would have laughed in the face of anyone who told me that four years ago, too, so I won't be offended. It's true, though. There's always an alternative, always a route to be taken that's not as direct but a lot more scenic. Many things might happen tomorrow, but the end of your dreams will not be one of them, no matter what.

And, for those for whom this spells the end of school and the start of university, I want to say one last thing. This is the start of the next big adventure: hang on tight, enjoy the ride, and savour every single moment.

Meme

2007-07-29T16:24:00Z

Meme, nicked from alaira and ladysarahii.

Name six of your favourite shows without looking below the cut, then answer the questions.

1. House
2. The West Wing
3. Lewis
4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
5. Doctor Who
6. The State Within

01. Who is your favourite character from #2? (The West Wing)

I honestly don't have one. I loved them all, pre-Season 5, unless we count Mandy, which I don't. I'd probably pick Will, because I loved Will in Season 4 beyond all sense or reason, but I have to ignore everything that happened from whatever the episode with Bingo Bob's inauguration was onwards, because he quickly stopped being the character I loved beyond all sense or reason.

02. Who is your least favourite character from #4? (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

I never liked Anya. I liked Kennedy much, much less, but Anya still wins that one, because I had to sit through four-and-a-half seasons worth of Anya and only about twelve episodes of Kennedy.

03. What would a crossover between #1 and #5 include? (House/Doctor Who)

You know, considering that Who gives me all of time and space to play with, House isn't the easiest of things to imagine a plausible crossover for, mostly because Smith and Jones basically took care of that. So, it would be Smith and Jones in Princeton. Chase would be the best Companion. None of the Ducklings are stellar, but he'd be the one who the Doctor would be the least likely to chuck into a black hole.

04. Who is your favourite ship from #6? (The State Within)

Nicholas Brocklehurst/Mark Brydon.

05. If you were to set one person from #3 and one person from #6 on a blind date, who would they be? (Lewis/The State Within)

Lewis and George have the potential to have an interesting blind date, I think.

06. If you could meet one person from #4 and spend the day with them, who would it be, and what would you do? (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

This depends entirely on whether you want the dirty answer or the family-friendly answer. :) I'd spent the day with Willow and we would do things that aren't suitable for innocent eyes to read about. Or I'd spent the day with Giles, who I think would be an awesome person to just *talk* to.

07. If you could change one thing about #2's plot line, what would you change? (The West Wing)

I wouldn't have written John Hoynes out. I'm fairly certain that Wells would have found some other way to screw it up -- while we're wishing for things, can I not just say that Sorkin wouldn't have left and Seasons 5 through 7 would have been good? -- but the whole concept of Life On Mars was cheapened by turning it into a plot device, and it was that one thing that allowed Wells to write Bingo Bob in and that was where everything started to unravel. Oh, and Josh would not have done a nutty at the Capitol, but I honestly don't know whether you could call that a plot "line", I certainly don't remember it fitting in with anything else.

8. Explain a relationship between two people (not necessarily romantic) from show #5, and why you like the relationship between them. (Doctor Who)?

I think that Jack and Martha could have been a really interesting relationship -- and I'm hoping that they'll explore that in Freema's episodes of Torchwood. I don't see it being romantic in the slightest. There was a connection between them right away, and that could develop into a really good friendship. It seemed like it was starting to, before The Year That Never Was. See, what they have with the Doctor is almost like a love triangle, only it's not, because it's not two characters being attracted to the same person and then competing for his affections, it's two characters who love this man and would do *anything* for him but he never even notices they're there, and so there's no jealousy and no competition and no romance, there's just Companions Anonymous. That's their big link. From there, it seems like a liking of each other for reasons that might not have anything to do with the Doctor could develop.

09. If the lead title characters (first name in the credits) from #1 and #3 were both drowning, and you could only save one, who would it be? (House/Lewis)

Lewis. Sorry.

10. If you could change the title characters' order in the credits for #4, what order would you choose? (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Besides knowing that SMG is first-billed and either Tony Head or Alyson Hannigan are last-billed depending on which season you're watching, I don't even know what order they *were* in, let alone starting to switch it round.

11. If you were able to add a new character, any kind of character you wanted, to the storyline for #6, what would the character be like, and what would their role be? (The State Within)

I wouldn't, because The State Within was as perfect as it is possible for TV to be.

12. What happens in your favourite episode of show #2? (The West Wing)

Josh is diagnosed with PTSD, or possibly an eating disorder and a fear of rectangles. Leo talks about guys who fall in holes and guys who know the way out. And Yo-Yo Ma rules!

13. If you could kill off one of the characters in #1, who would it be and how would you do it? (House)

Cameron, and I don't care, as long as it isn't lingering and doesn't involve deathbed declarations of love for House.

14. If you got the chance to visit the set for either show #3 or show #5, which would you choose? (Lewis/Doctor Who)

Doctor Who. Come ON! Also, going on board the TARDIS is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but visiting the Lewis set involves me calling up my friend's sister and asking if I can come stay for a couple of days, what with her living in an Oxford college.

15. If you could date anyone from any of these shows, which show and which person?

George Blake from The State Within, Martha Jones from Doctor Who, and Willow Rosenberg from Buffy. Now, who thinks I can date three women at the same time, particularly *these* three women, none of whom are likely to take any bullshit or act dumb, and not blow my cover?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-07-23T12:29:14Z

* I think Dudley surprised everyone. I'd like to have seen whether he at least made it out all right.

* There are ninety-three Warner Brothers executives having collective heart attacks at how much it's going to cost them to shoot this, and that’s not even counting everything that happened *after* page 55, Daniel Radcliffe is wondering how it's ended up where he's going to have to spend more time naked than he did for an average night in Equus, Michael Gambon has realised that perhaps he started planning his retirement just a little too early, and there's some poor bloke who's been told he has to persuade Network Rail to remove all the trains from King's Cross for a couple of days and is now tearing great chunks of his hair out.

* I am not a squeamish woman, but I do not deal well with the idea of people getting their ears cut off.

* I didn't feel the death of Mad-Eye as much as I thought I should. It felt less about the death of an individual and more about the stunning, crashing realisation that, yes, this is *war* and this man is only the first of the many who will fall in battle fighting for what he believes is right.

* Hermione broke my heart into tiny little pieces with the memory modification on her parents.

* Hermione having more or less proved my point about why I do not do stupid piddly little bags, I now want to know how I can get an Undetectable Extension Charm put on mine.

* For most of the book, being outside of the comfort zone of Hogwarts, we didn't exactly know what was going on in the wider wizarding world, but the scenes in the Ministry and the bit with Remus in Grimmauld Place and once we did actually make it to Hogwarts, there were definite undertones of the wizarding world bearing a strong resemblance to Nazi Germany, the pinnacle being the Muggle-Born Registration Committee, and it not going unnoticed that Dumbledore's duel with Grindelwald was in 1945. The whole thing made me incredibly uncomfortable, and that means that she did her job.

* The whole of fandom called RAB while they were still reading Half-Blood Prince, right?

* I ventured tentatively onto the comms last night when I had finished reading, and I was pleased to see that my little corner of fandom is not awash with threats to poke JKR's eyes out. To begin with, I should mention that kiteyes deserves some kind of award for making me snort coffee out of my nose when I was reading her notes, which made a number of references to me and things that I was not going to like, and culminated with the coffee snortage in a comment on the scene in Grimmauld Place with Remus talking about the terrible mistake he had made in marrying Tonks: "sefkhet's probably agreeing with him but for completely different reasons". I do not hate Tonks. The idea of Remus as a father makes me go all squishy inside. I did not hate the Remus/Tonks in this book, and a big part of that was that this relationship happened very fast and it's not stretching it to say that they may have got married because Tonks got pregnant and, while he seems to be thrilled with his son, Remus still appears to be considerably less invested in his marriage than Tonks is. Harry, even, when he was kicking Remus out, was a lot more bothered about the idea of Remus abandoning his son than he was about him ditching his wife. And, um, when Harry opened the Resurrection Stone, it was to see Remus and Sirius and James and Lily, with Tonks nowhere in sight, and, yeah, that helped.

* I think I kind of love Kreacher. I squeed a little bit inside at his fluffy white ear-hair and his, "shoes off, Master Harry, and hands washed before dinner", and when he was leading the charge of the house-elves, that was just brilliant.

* All of the Ron/Hermione shippiness was lovely, although I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me. Harry's "sort of" when Krum asked him if they were together was really all that could be said about them, wasn't it? Ron's crap at being in a relationship. Good. Like the thing with him leaving Harry and Hermione, he's seventeen, he screws up, he's not supposed to be perfect.

* Actually, nobody's supposed to be perfect, and if Half-Blood Prince was about them finally growing up and becoming adults, this was about realising that, about learning that nothing is black and white. Harry's last delusion was about the infallibility of Dumbledore, his perfection, and I think that for all the seeds were being sown, right up until the King's Cross chapter, Harry was hoping that he would learn that it was all spin, that Rita Skeeter talks a load of crap and Aberforth was the jealous not-nearly-as-brilliant brother, but it wasn't, because that's what life is like. On the flipside, we see Harry save Draco Malfoy's life. The man was a snotrag, I do honestly believe that he was a Death Eater even though he couldn't bring himself to identify Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but there are shades of grey. He wasn't Voldemort, he wasn't even his father. He was doing what he was told to do because he'd never had any reason to think that there might be another way.

* Here Lies Dobby, a Free Elf.

* It's good to see that Pettigrew's life debt to Harry did end up being important.

* NEVILLE! This was quite possibly my favourite bit. I had wanted him to get to kill Bellatrix Lestrange, but I'm okay with that, what with Molly Weasley being my new hero and all that, and because what he did get to do was even better. I love that he's been leading the DA. Awful though the consequences have been for him, I love that he's been standing up to the new regime. I *adore* his grandmother and how proud she is of him. I love Harry passing the mantle to Neville. I love him being the one, out of all of them, to go for Voldemort when he brings Harry's 'dead' body back into the Great Hall. I love that he's able to draw Godric Gryffindor's sword from the Sorting Hat. And I did a little dance when he killed Nagini.

* PERCY!

* I was pretty much crying non-stop by the time I got to this point, but Luna, the one who said what we were all thinking, she played her part in finishing me off -- "We’re all still here," she whispered. "We're still fighting." I, like alto2, kept on thinking about Ten and, "Wait till you read Book 7. Oh, I cried." This was the line that made me think of that more than anything. Because as much as it's about Harry killing Voldemort, it's about him not having to do it alone, about the resilience of the human spirit, and there they all were, at what might as well have been the end of the universe, still fighting.

* Lots of references to backstory, lots of inside jokes. Best one: "Crookshanks? Are you a wizard or what?"

* I have an urge to go back through the previous six books in search of references to times that Snape has made a point of either looking into Harry's eyes or avoiding looking into Harry's eyes. I'm glad that Snape turned out to be good, in the end, and, on a rather random note, that he did not actually intend to slice George's ear off. I still have a lot of questions about Snape, about the ease with which he allowed Hogwarts to be ruled in terror considering he was still supposed to be in the Order, but for most of it, it's the thing about black and white all over again. He's always going to be a bastard, he's never liked Harry, but he's one of the good guys. It was Sirius, I think, who told Harry in The Order of the Phoenix that the world is not split into good people and Death Eaters, and that's true.

* She was really trying to make us think she had it in for Hagrid. Twice. My mum hasn't read it yet, she took her copy to work with her this morning, and she just called me twenty minutes ago and flailed about how she thought Hagrid was dead. That's only from him falling off Sirius's motorbike, too, God knows what she'll do when she gets to the end.

* I feel as though I should say something about the Trio, but there's nothing to say. It was wonderful. It was exactly as it should be. Ever since they defeated the troll in the girls' bathroom in First Year, it's been the three of them, together, and that was how it should have ended and that was how it did end. And, when it was over, it was Harry and Ron and Hermione who left the Great Hall and were together, because everyone else could wait.

* I think I'm probably one of the only people who did, but I actually liked the epilogue. I agree with everyone who said that it's basically fanfic, but there's going to be a thousand of them within the next week and probably many more over the coming years detailing what the fans think happened -- if there's one thing fandom's good at, it's ignoring canon -- and that's great, but I also wanted to know what really happened. I wanted to know that they got their happy ending. The idea of Harry as a father makes me go all squishy inside. I didn't especially mind that we didn't get to find out what any of them are doing besides raising kids, it was enough to know that they suspended the having kids gig for at least six or seven years so clearly they're doing *something*. I loved Professor Longbottom like a thing that you love. It felt right to end it there, on Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters, coming full circle from where we met all of them, and that even now, a quarter of a century later, every single kid on that train knows exactly who Harry Potter is.

* One thing, barely worth mentioning: Albus Severus Potter? They might as well have stuck a kick-me sign on the birth certificate.

* RIP Hedwig, Mad-Eye Moody, Ted Tonks, Dobby, Snape, Fred Weasley, Moony, Nymphadora Tonks, Colin Creevey, and the fifty others who were unnamed but no less important for all that.

Crossposted to dhdiscussion.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-07-22T21:50:06Z

I'm crying too much to be either long-winded or coherent, and I'll post more tomorrow, but for now enough to say that I loved it and I can't believe it's over.

Predictions for the Deathly Hallows

2007-07-19T21:41:40Z

I stole this from ladysarahii and sixpence1969, slipping it in under the radar before I get proved wrong.

DO NOT POST SPOILERS IN COMMENTS.

I'm on LJ blackout after tonight, but I'll still be checking email and the last thing I want is ten comment notifications informing me that my prediction for #10 is crap and Remus and Tonks get married and have seventeen baby werewolves with pink fur.

1) The thing with Petunia was an enormous red herring.

Ever since OotP, we've all been saying that Petunia is going to be somehow involved in the downfall of Voldemort and that it will have something to do with the promise she made to Dumbledore. I only stopped believing this after the movie -- they've always said that they're not allowed to cut out anything that'll have a major impact on the plot in the later books, and according to movie canon, that promise never happened and Petunia never received that Howler. I think we'll see Harry and Ron and Hermione go back to Privet Drive, as they said they were going to do, and I think it'll be comedy gold, and I think that's the last we'll see of the Dursleys.

2) The body count will include Voldemort, Snape, Bellatrix Lestrange, Percy, Ginny, Peter Pettigrew, and Rufus Scrimgeour.

*ducks*

I'm not doubting the truthfulness of the quote about two deaths, but I don't believe that we're going to get out of this with *just* two deaths, and I have a number of reasons for thinking this. The main one is that I think that what we're going to get here is that good conquers evil, and for that to happen, terrible sacrifices must be made. This is a point that was first made with the deaths of Lily and James, and underlined when Sirius told Peter that he should have, "died rather than betrayed your friends, as we would have done for you." There were a lot of things left unresolved at the end of HBP, and one of the theories that was put forward at the time was that Snape and Dumbledore had an agreement that if it ever came to that point, Snape would kill Dumbledore before he would let Malfoy pass that point of no return and become a murderer, and if it's true, that too was a terrible sacrifice. I imagine that the Final Fight is going to be one of some magnitude, and that coupled with the numbers that we're led to believe were lost in the first war suggest to me that in the grand scheme of things, two deaths would be a relatively small sacrifice. My other reason for thinking this is that in all the predictions I've seen about who dies, Voldemort is never mentioned and none of the Death Eaters are ever mentioned. So, when we're talking about two deaths, I'm expecting the deaths of two main characters -- for my money, Snape and Ginny -- who are on the side of the Order, and the deaths of both minor characters and Death Eaters over and above that.

If anyone's wondering why I've got the new Minister for Magic on that list, it's because I think he'll get himself killed out of sheer stupidity, judging by his behaviour in HBP.

3) Snape will kill Voldemort.

This is my pet theory, and if it turns out I'm right, I'm going to be kicking myself for not putting money on it, because it's certainly not a popular one. I know what the prophecy said, but I think that prophecies can be defied and that we wouldn't have sat through all that stuff in PoA about Divination being a very woolly branch of magic if this one was going to be followed to the letter. I think that Harry will be central to it, however it ends, but the power that Harry's got that Voldemort hasn't is that he doesn't have to do this on his own, and what better way to demonstrate that than having someone who isn't Harry commit the actual deed?

4) Neville will kill Bellatrix Lestrange.

I'll be very disappointed if this doesn't happen. He deserves his moment of glory, and he should get to avenge what she did to his parents.

5) Horcruxes will be somehow involved.

Because that was a hell of a waste of 300 pages if they're not.

6) Draco Malfoy is one of the bad guys.

I'll be lynched by an angry mob of fangirls for that, but I don't like Malfoy, I've never liked Malfoy, and I don't think he's going to be redeemed at the eleventh hour. I think he's a nasty little shit, and he'll ultimately end up being a Death Eater in practice as well as in theory. I like the theory that I mentioned above, that Dumbledore didn't want him to go past that point of no return and that's why Snape killed Dumbledore, but I think that Dumbledore liked to believe that nobody was beyond redemption, and that Malfoy was one of the times that Dumbledore got it wrong.

7) RAB is Regulus Black.

I called that two years ago, along with every other person in the known universe.

8) The life debt that exists between Pettigrew and Harry will be important.

I'm not convinced that Pettigrew is going to save Harry, but a life debt was created between them when Harry stopped Remus and Sirius from killing him, and that's going to come up somewhere, whether it's because he does save him or it's because he's given the opportunity to save him and doesn't and we find out exactly what happens when someone willingly breaks that sort of debt.

9) Hogwarts will remain open.

I don't think that the Trio will actually go back to school. I don't think that Neville will go back to school, either, and I think that Grandma Longbottom will either be very impressed or pitch a hissy fit, nothing in the middle. I think that Ginny and Luna -- who have taken their OWLs and are therefore, under the laws of the UK education system as they were in 1998, as legally entitled to leave school as they are -- will also leave, although in Ginny's case this will be in extreme defiance of Mrs Weasley. I do, however, think that the school will stay open and that it will end up being the site of the final battle.

10) Remus and Tonks are not together.

Or so my little tiny Remus/Sirius heart would like to believe, but I am, sadly, not holding my breath for this one.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2007-07-14T17:41:54Z

I'm going to go back in a minute and go through my flist to find all the posts that I've skipped over in the last few days and comment on them, but I wanted to do mine without being influenced by anyone else. I know that I knew what happened, but I didn't want to know how that had translated on-screen and I'm glad I avoided it -- there were a lot of ways that Hollywood could have screwed this up, and, for the most part, I think they came through brilliantly. I'm a little inclined to believe that there are going to be some book purists who'll *hate* it, and, yes, they cut a lot out, but unlike some of the stuff that was cut out from, say, The Prisoner of Azkaban, the majority of it wasn't about cutting stuff out so much as it was about film being a very different medium from books. If you're going to turn an 800 page book into a movie without it becoming one of those Quidditch matches that goes on for weeks, you have to cut through the window dressing and get to what matters. Don't get me wrong, I *like* JKR's window dressing provided it doesn't involve references to that couple that I don't talk about, but a movie can't work like that.

+ Having just defended everything that got cut, what I will say is that I'm kind of disappointed to learn that Petunia isn't going to be instrumental in the downfall of Voldemort -- she's always said that they don't get to cut anything out that will become important in later plot and if she had been important that Howler that she never got would have been a lynchpin -- and I would have been hellish confused about who exactly Mrs Figg was if I hadn't read the books, what with how she never got mentioned in The Philosopher's Stone at *all* and her never having actually been referred to as a Squib.

+ I want to fly down the Thames on a broomstick. That was quite some cinematography. In a two minute sequence, they managed to effectively convey almost everything I love about London.

+ Umbridge was foul, in the best way possible. The pink, the annoying little laugh, the kittens, the handbags. And that's before I even get started on what she was actually doing. I was disappointed in the lack of Professor McGonagall, but when she did show up, and particularly when she had that fight with Umbridge, I appreciated her so much more than I usually do.

+ There were definitely more than a few times when I jumped up and down in my seat and yelped, "Sir Mark!" The State Within turned me into a Jason Isaacs fan, and he will always and forever be Sir Mark to me, and, really, thank God for the Paris Hilton wig.

+ I thought that Luna was overinflated, which I wouldn't mind because I liked her and thought that she came across very well, only I also thought that it was done at the expense of what could have been more Ginny, and at the point we're at now, it's fairly obvious that we're not going to get one of my favourite scenes from Half Blood Prince -- "yes, and last time I checked, he was definitely one boy, not twelve" -- and it's difficult to imagine how we're going to get from there to her being Harry's girlfriend in the space of half a movie.

+ When we did get Ginny, she kicked ASS. I particularly loved the part in the DA when she performed whatever spell it was she was doing and Fred and George looked at her with not a little bit of awe.

+ The way they did the DA was fantastic, all of it.

+ I was mightily pissed off when Cho was the one to bust them. I understand why they did it, everything with Marietta would have been too much and too long, but Cho, for the love of God. I nearly kissed Snape when he revealed that she had done it under the influence of Veritaserum.

+ The thing with Grawp was great, too, especially the look on Hermione's face when she rang the bicycle bell, which was a mirror image of the look Scott gives me when I blow something up that I didn't exactly mean to blow up, a little sarcastic 'yay'.

+ Is my thing for Emma Watson still squicky now that she's seventeen? It kind of is, right? I don't care. For the record, though, pretty as she was at the Yule Ball in The Goblet of Fire with the hair and the dress, she's a hundred times sexier in jeans with her regular hair. I would say that she's a hundred times sexier in uniform, but I'm aware that that's leaving them realms of squicky and bordering on plain kinky. No worse than sixpence1969 telling me that Sirius is "so my dead fantasy wizard boyfriend", but whatever. :)

+ The way they kept on cutting to things by using the Daily Prophet was an excellent piece of cinematography.

+ Nev made me cry.

+ There was enough Remus/Sirius to keep me happy. I know they cut a lot of that out, but again, movies are a different medium. Harry came into Grimmauld Place and saw the two of them in the kitchen at which point they were practically sitting in one anothers' laps, and then he came downstairs to dinner and hugged Sirius while Remus stood at Sirius's shoulder and beamed fondly, and, most importantly, Remus was the one to grab Harry when Sirius went through the veil, and that'll do me. More importantly even than that, there was a distinct lack of Remus and Tonks making googly eyes at each other.

+ The shots of Harry and Sirius fighting side by side were absolutely perfect.

+ I know that they did it because they didn't have time to get in all the bits with Mrs Weasley and Sirius fighting about how Sirius treats Harry and what Sirius *thinks* of Harry, but the line, "nice one, James" was not absolutely perfect and was unnecessary, in my opinion. Sirius was a screwed up man, and he was mourning the death of the best friend he never got to mourn when he actually died, and he loved Harry very much, but I don't believe that he ever actually believed that Harry was James, and so that part annoyed me.

+ I didn't cry as much as I thought I would when Sirius died. I was inconsolable when I was reading the book, but that was because I *stopped* reading the book for a good half hour to get it out of my system. There was too much else going on in the Department of Mysteries to actually stop and cry properly. I was inconsolable when Cedric died, but I didn't start crying until they got out of the graveyard, and by that point, the action was over.

+ Nitpick: SIRIUS WAS NOT BLOODY KILLED BY THE ADAVA KEDAVRA CURSE. He dodged Adava Kedavra, and then Bellatrix hit him with a spell that sent out a jet of red light and he fell behind the veil and that was how he died, and that it wasn't Adava Kedavra was the battle cry from all of us who didn't want to believe that Sirius was really dead, including me, so if they think that legions of fen aren't going to pick up on that one, they've got to be kidding.

+ The whole thing in the Department of Mysteries was one of the best choreographed pieces they've ever done.

+ Professor Flitwick got a round of applause from the audience when he quietly cheered Fred and George on -- and that was also one of the best choreographed pieces they've ever done.

+ I'm really glad they kept the bit with Harry and Ron and Hermione discussing Harry's kiss, it was just as funny as it was in the book and the little moments when the three of them can just be teenagers and best friends are just as important as the more extensive moments when they have to stop being teenagers for long enough to save the world.

+ Snape and Draco appeared to be underutilised, but I'm not sure that they were really in the book that much, and they should both certainly get their moments of glory in Half Blood Prince.

+ The way Umbridge's inspections were shown was also good, but I would have paid good money for even a tiny snapshot of her inspection of McGonagall.

I loved it, really really loved it, and now... roll on next weekend. There's a part of me that can't wait, and there's a part that is secretly dreading it, because God, I love this world that Rowling has created, and I don't want it to be over.