grasshopper

Grid is good

2006-03-31T15:54:00.000Z

After reading Stuart Campbell's article on Grid Wars, I broke my long abstinence from gaming to try it out. He's quite right. On one level it's a perfectly-executed old-school shooter, hectic, tricky and fun. On another it's a strategy game, with different behaviour patterns of your various enemies and black holes sucking them and you in rewarding clever play. He explains it better than I can.

I'd go slightly further in one direction, though: Grid Wars is educational. To do well demands a whole set of life skills. Prioritisation: one green square, which homes in on you and dodges your shots, takes precedence over a screenful of aimlessly drifting pink fans. Addressing the roots of problems (the tiny icons which generate enemies) rather than the shoots which presently bother you (the enemies themselves). Treating different problems differently: pink fans can simply be blasted, green squares need to be wrongfooted by scattered fire, red bends need to be doubled back on as they chase you. (As yet I don't know how to deal with the linked pairs of orange triangles. Suggestions welcomed.) Balancing risk and reward: shepherding enemies into black holes provides an exceptional payoff only if you destroy them in time, as left too late, they'll explode and leave you nothing but more enemies to deal with. Conversely, you can use a smart bomb to clear a crowded field, but you lose the score multiplier which builds over time: the more hectic an on-screen life you can stand, the more you can gain, and the more likely you are that something will knock you out. It's a rare piece of solid evidence for that dubious thesis that gaming does you good.

What's more, it offers nothing to support the thesis that gaming is corrupting. You won't be immersed in the game-world for days on end: my average game length so far is five minutes, and even a high-score-trouncing virtuoso performance is about fifteen. And, despite 'Wars', its violence is abstracted out of existence. Though its game mechanics mix Robotron and Space War, visually it's a direct descendant of Asteroids: you're a tiny polygon, emitting polygons, causing other polygons to splinter and disappear. No blood, no brandished guns, just primary colours. Nor any rattle of gunfire or death, just a medly of distinctive synth sounds telling you what's entered or left the scene. When processing power can deliver near-film-realism, that restraint is commendable. It gets into the primeval psyche only in that it demands you survive: there's no kick of feeling deadly or powerful.

The abstraction also makes it, I imagine, much easier to code. Which, given that the new realism demands million-dollar budgets and hundred-strong development teams, is another plus. I was surprised - yet not surprised - to find it was put together in a descendant of a language I used to code Snake games in, by the kind of tiny group that ruled the world fifteen years ago and hasn't been seen since. It's personally and lovingly crafted, a proof that no matter how decadent the mainstream of an artform becomes, independent makers can always quietly redeem it. For that reason as much as any of the above, it's worth treasuring.

There is no do

2006-03-22T16:10:00.000Z

(In which I make some sweeping and unfounded generalisations about British tastes. Count it as a royal 'we' if you will.)

Is it odd that I tuned in to Star Trek: Voyager this afternoon in order to catch a famously bad episode? ('Threshold'. And it is rewardingly awful.) I have a general fondness for crap things. But bad Star Trek is a conjunction of slick, serious form with utterly twaddly content, and in that sense it's the opposite of much outsider art and music, where the makers' passion and investment meet their lack of basic competence. Different kinds of guilty pleasure.

So I wonder if it's not something more pathological. Is it what Bill Bailey remarks on in Part Troll (caught on Channel 4, available on DVD, hilarious, highly recommended), that British people get a kick out of disappointment? Rather than enjoying success, in yourself or others, there's a more rarified pleasure in watching things go wrong and complaining about them. Not living in and improving the now, but putting yourself at a remove, being the editor and commentator of the repeated highlights (or rather lowlights) of life. If we had better weather, we'd stop talking about it. (That may be the reason for the standard British life-cycle: once you've become successful, it's almost obligatory to move to Europe or the Caribbean. Britain is something to be suffered: even its balmy days are heralds of rain. What does it mean that my long-term plan is to move to somewhere with even worse weather, Scotland or Scandinavia? I digress.) We don't have a culture of success: we want success for ourselves, but hold back from applauding it too much. Genuinely driven professional people can easily become figures of distaste (Alan Sugar); wannabes are figures of amusement (The Armstrongs).

On the other hand, we don't exactly idolise failure either. For protagonists, we prefer the ones caught between the two: striving but not quite dedicated, winning little battles but never the war. We can't quite embrace the Hollywood or Homeric hero, who is or becomes genuinely great in order to defeat huge odds. The most we can really tolerate is for heroes to summon their limited strength and keep their inadequacies at bay. If the odds are stacked against them, we'd rather they gave their best and failed than gave their best and won. It's the former that gives better matter for complaint - or for reflection and learning. Somehow we institute a separation between who you are and what you do. Your life can be a disaster area, your actions dreadful, yet you can still be a good person.* A soft, comforting, unconstructive, doubtful sentiment.

You could probably chalk it up to the Loss of Empire. I'm not sure I would: most of the population doesn't remember what it was like when the atlas was mostly pink, and I don't think the sense would be handed down through generations. But something gives us a sense of national superiority which doesn't sit easily with not having powers to match (and which makes us grab at any opportunity to look like we do: the Commonwealth Games, 'our' noisy support for any given war, etc.) And that's a kind of failure we ought not to 'fix'. Whether we can accept this and find a more healthy attitude towards success and failure, I don't know. I'm doubtful. But until then we'll keep our interesting sense of humour.

* (Or a bad one. In story it may not matter. A contrast: two good alternative sitcoms from opposite sides of the pond. My Name Is Earl has plenty of edge, but its central premise is a man setting things right, learning as he goes, and presenting his story to you in an open monologue. Peep Show takes place within the heads of its two protagonists, giving you their streams of self-deception and fantasy and how they translate into blundering action and repeatedly screw everything up. One leaves you with a warm glow afterwards, the other leaves you howling with laughter and/or embarrassed recognition. That's the trade-off.)

Warm Copper Whiskers, no. 1

2006-03-19T23:04:00.000Z

(Some of my favourite things, that is. These are treasures of a sentimental kind, so their write-ups are wholly subjective; more meditations than recommendations. Not that I'll stop you trying them yourself, but your mileage may vary.)

Number one: Aphex Twin's Richard D James Album.

In a way I don't particularly like Aphex Twin. For me, he demonstrates the unspoken problem with the successful 'creator-for-himself': from Come To Daddy onwards, it was as if James realised that his talent and his fans' reverence would ensure sales and admiration for practically anything that he could put out. Drukqs certainly didn't sound like its creator was driven by any higher calling or dire need: some deeply pretty semi-acoustic pieces, a few spectacular but unmusical beatmongery workouts, and a brace of incomprehensible offcuts. I haven't heard any of the Analord series, but the description and critical reaction suggests that it's a big step back to his only-historically-interesting rave period.

This is frustrating because his peaks show him to be capable of brilliance: unearthly ugly-gorgeous sound manipulation ('Windowlicker'), heartbreaking freeform melodies ('Alberto Balsalm'), warm baths of ambience ('Parallel Stripes'). Philip Glass had good reason to want to rework 'Icct Hedral' as a chamber piece. So I have a special regard for the couple of really consistent albums he's created. Selected Ambient Works Volume II is one: it contains a huge tonal and musical variety, but all its pieces seem to issue from the same misty underworld. In interviews James describes them as transcriptions of the music from his lucid dreams. As music to work to, it's ideal. As music to listen to, it's a bottomless well of perturbation. As art, it's probably his greatest achievement.

But the Richard D. James Album is the one I'm really fond of. It's the opposite to SAWII in most ways: no murk, no echoing spaces, no hidden depths. Where SAWII is hypnotic and minimal, with single pulses slowly modulating for ten minutes on end, RDJ tracks average three minutes and hurls a new twist and novelty at you every few seconds. Its drum programming is insectile, throwing out the idea of a groove in favour of unpredictable stutters and skips. But - what separates it from drum and bass before and since - the racket is paired with exuberant melodies, played out in brightly-hued synthesisers, chamber strings and voices. Sometimes it's very silly: miscellaneous percussion gambols around a furious church-organ in 'Logon Rock Witch', 'Corn Mouth' ends with the loading sound from a Spectrum game, '4' (the album's most portentous moment, with drumrolls reverberating like thunder) is punctuated by a sample of the author and an unnamed other: 'Richard?' 'Yeah?' Sometimes it's very sad: 'Girl/Boy Song' is a virtuoso-piece of breakbeat science, but its rhythm gives way at last to orchestral harmonies like a memory of the sun rising over rolling hills.

I can't think of any other albums which sound so strange and yet so coherent, so right; like SAWII, it feels like James has found something particular and special to tap into. I think it's childhood: unbridled joy, sorrow, excitement, experimentation, naivety, more than a few tantrums and terrors (halfway through 'To Cure A Weakling Child', harmlessly chiming voices turn into a fearsome but quickly-exhausted metallic clatter). All presented directly, wildly, freely: who needs maturity and reticence? we're young. And it does make you feel young. At 33 minutes total, it's also over very quickly. But the memories are happy.

Galloway versus Big Brother: Live!

2006-01-27T20:55:00.000Z

For those unfamiliar with the inordinately popular (in the UK at least) phenomenon that is Big Brother: they cherry-pick twelve members of the public for maximum personality clash, put them in a sealed house wired to the gills with cameras, make their supplies contingent on doing embarrassing things, ask them to vote each other out on regular basis, broadcast results live, give last man standing large sum of cash. The Orwell quotation's appropriate, inasmuch as watching it does give you a sense that you're living in some terrible dystopia where this passes for entertainment. Recently, though, they've cranked the common denominator down yet further by having a Celebrity edition.

Among the pop stars, models and sports personalities (including a discontented Dennis Rodman) was George Galloway, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. He went into the show reasoning that any way to get politics into the collective conscious of Britain's young people was welcome. One coming out he clarified things a bit, expressing disappointment that much of his political utterance was cut, contrary to the producers' promise that it would be a 'soapbox' for his politics. Meanwhile he'd put a few more scandals next to the Senate oil-purchase hearings in his inbox: what was he doing on national TV while momentous decisions about his constituency were being made, while motions he'd signed were going through the House of Commons? And what was an MP doing impersonating a cat or a Spandexed robot? The latter incidents weren't spontaneous but challenges for the show's contestants, but that was a detail to the tabloid press, who seized them as gifts. The papers which aren't Murdoch-owned and right-wing stand squarely behind the Labour government; Respect, at the westernmost peninsula of liberalism, is naturally anathema to them - and here was its most prominent figure, in highly public (and photogenic) postures of ridicule. How better way to dismiss them?

For someone who invests a lot of faith in understanding politics and British youth, it was a remarkably poor gamble. No-one who watches Big Brother, has been in Big Brother, makes Big Brother expects anything more of it than dirty, schadenfreude-rich, car-crash entertainment. Did Galloway think he could redefine the show's remit alone? But then, Galloway was one of the most vocal campaigners against the Iraq war: could he have been enacting how things should have been in Iraq, the individual somehow transcending the absolute oppression of his enviroment, overthrowing it, remaking it on his own terms?

In any case, the giants weren't toppled, and onlookers were amused as the windmill bore him aloft. As the voting got to the stage where the surviving contestants tend to be those the public like, rather than those the public think will make interesting viewing, he went by a landslide.

Yet, still... Galloway has the magnetism of all famous and infamous leaders, focused to a Kurtz-like intensity in his stare. What must have frustrated his opponents was that the BB pressure cooker didn't induce any cracks in his composure: the presentation stayed the same, sharp, bold, hard. The suspected heart of darkness wasn't discovered. The only novelties were new facets of his acting talents. He was not only convincing but cute in cat mode. His robot had the same gusto. They were most disturbing not because neither became him as an MP, but because he became the roles so easily and fully. They didn't feel so different from his normal conduct. Both seemed equally performances for the arrays of unseen cameras and the nation behind them. And I wasn't convinced that he wouldn't perform for anyone: for the House of Commons, for the Senate, for the Hussein family...

It's not an insult to politicans to say none of them are honest, just a recognition of the reality of public life. The recent string of largely inconsequential scandals surrounding the Lib Dem leadership contest is only an example among many: micromanage your image and your message or die. If you believe in them, make the public believe it. If you don't, it's probably not your call. There's no measurable gap between sincerity and falsehood. You can measure policy, but there one talking head is like another. The real winning factors are presence, charm, credibility, theatre. Galloway has all of these, but so much so that the curve of trust falls away again, that your suspicions can only be aroused... he can't be real, can he? Somehow being reduplicated down to the pores on several million screens made him even less substantial. (Especially so if you live in Bethnal Green and Bow.)

I wish more politicians shared his manner: pithy, fierce, committed. It speaks to young people. It speaks to me, against my better judgement. If the Lib Dems could put it on, they would fly. But on Big Brother Galloway only brought the fallacy of trusting any public figure, with the way personality dominates politics now, into uncomfortable relief. A valuable awareness to raise, but not the one he had in mind.

This morning

2006-01-11T09:19:00.000Z

I've recently taken up jogging. Half an hour, first thing, around the nearby racecourse; trying to assert some rhythm in my daily business. The winter break's seen me sleep later and later. When I woke up at three one afternoon having gone to bed at five the previous night, I decided to push myself through the night and the following day and force the body clock into alignment with daylight and with the rest of the civilised world.

The all-nighter is a surreal experience: sleeplessness is strong magic, and does things to you. Until about four you're beset by anxiety as you get ever closer to transgressing the unwritten rule that all must sleep at night, and become feverishly busy looking at things. After that a strange, solitary serenity sets in, and you leave meaningful messages in journals. By daylight you're just tired, and cook unhealthy things badly while watching television. Eventually you feel normal again, except that your IQ has dropped by thirty points. At half-past seven you crash.

But this morning I rise at five-thirty, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and feel it was all worth it as I don in my still-shiny track bottoms and running shoes. I go outside. Common Sense says it's morning, the Bleeding Obvious points out that it's still dark, and drizzling to boot. The suburban streets are empty, lights off. For a moment I'm the Last Man, and I'm jogging. But beyond the cul-de-sac lorries and commuters fly past on the main road, so there's evidently life in the world. I run down it.

A creature appears on the pavement, oddly bright under the streetlamps. A cat. No, wait: a fox. Inner Teenage Girl squeals a bit as it stares and flees. I follow it onto the racecourse, and quickly lose it, because the streets are nothing to the dark out there. By day the course is usually dormant, an expanse of empty ground where the locals walk their dogs and fly sports kites, but by night it's a blackness. I stick to the main roads. Common Sense reassures me that muggers will know joggers don't carry cash, but Suburban Paranoia will harp on Cambridge's serial knifeman last year, who stabbed students walking home through the morning.

I turn the far corner, down the long straight road leading to the stands. No cars. And around me a noise rises like the starting of the engine of the end of the world, as gales hurl themselves across the flat emptiness of the course and into the trees' skeletal branches. And the heavens open, huge rain slashing across the road, traced by the streetlight. And Suburban Paranoia gives way to Primeval Fear, as if this storm could keep rising out of that sudden void in the middle of suburbia. And I'm jogging.

I flee around the corner, into a side street. When I return to the main road the sky pelts me with small rocks, but that's not Fear, just Pain; and in the pain-brings-health context of jogging I somehow feel it'll do my skin good. I pass other tracksuited Quixotes. The feeling passes. But the the skies have close again, and begin to lighten, just as I get home. It's as if the Sublime had been laid on to caution me: the diurnal course is not for your petty meddling. Common Sense says it's just Pathetic Fallacy talking, but then, it would...

Begins with T

2005-11-30T23:04:00.000Z

I don’t know what the words ‘tea’ and ‘Britain’ together conjure for the rest of the world. Perhaps the image is fading of a Wodehousian gentry determinedly taking it at five o’ clock precisely, the season determining whether it is taken with cucumber sandwiches at the boundary of a cricket pitch or with crumpets by the blazing hearth of the ancestral pile. Charming pictures, the more so for being almost, but not quite, entirely unlike reality. Less fanciful, though still doubtfully accurate, is the stereotype more current among the British, of the cluster of bare-chested builders, breaking off work at any conceivable opportunity to knock back a sturdy cuppa. Advertisers have subverted and capitalised on both: Stephen Fry, who remains famous for portraying Jeeves, lends his associations to one brand while respectfully remarking on the builder as a conoisseur of tea, while another, faintly echoing the tactics of an earlier era, links the builder’s strength to the strength of the tea. (In reality it’s the number of sugars, but we’ll get on to that.) PG Tips’ first television advertising showed monkeys having an elegant tea-party.

Tea is Britain’s universal drink. Others’ roles are limited. Coffee continues to soar in popularity, but the multinational chains which sell it do so by renewing the cachet it had at its introduction in the seventeenth century: as a smart, sophisticated, sobering drink. Its function as a workaday pick-me-up and status symbol is still too marked. Beer, once coffee’s relaxing opposite, has also become specific, as licensing, workplace regulation and the stigma of alcoholism have made it part of an evening’s recreation and little else (though lately-relaxed licensing laws could help a revival). Wines and spirits remain for special occasions or special people. Tea isn’t part of formal occasions, but it’s otherwise ubiquitous: any time, any place. We do still have afternoon tea - and morning tea, lunchtime tea, evening tea, breakfast tea, bedtime tea…

Tea is also a subject of shared interest without being itself that interesting, much like the weather or reality television. An extreme example: my final Physics project at secondary school was an experiment to determine the optimum brewing conditions for a cup of tea, using a complex setup of stand, boss, clamp, beaker, bunsen, chromatograph and teabag. My conclusions (supported by a colourful three-dimensional graph) were:

a) tetrahedral bags are as effective as claimed,
b) there’s no point in brewing anything for longer than six minutes, with two to three an optimal compromise between flavour and time, and
c) tiny drawstring bags are comprehensively useless.

The examiners were satisfied with this nerdy display, even though I hadn’t time to settle another long-standing debate: should milk or brewed tea be poured into the cup first? The former risks strength miscalculations, the latter risks curdling the milk on impact. A daytime talk show recently argued about this for ten minutes, with the servant responsible for the Queen’s tea service insisting that the tea went first, but a survey of the public generally disapproving of his brew. Further complications arise if you brew in-cup: when do you remove the bag? A friend’s practice of immediately pouring milk over the brewing teabag provoked irrational horror. It was just wrong somehow. And then there’s biscuit-dunking, a debate which is to milk/tea precedence what questioning God’s existence is to speculating about what species Leviathan was. What shape? What duration? What technique? Only something truly integral to a nation’s culture could sustain questioning this absurd.

Tea not only spans social class, but actively transcends it. It forms a point of interaction between the Frys and the builders. Offering someone a cuppa is the recognised gesture of common humanity, and of common identity, as something intrinsically British. George Orwell was unsurprisingly keen on it, disseminating brewing instructions in the Evening Standard, and portraying it at the centre of a formative experience in The Road to Wigan Pier:

‘But this was Saturday night and a hefty young stevedore was drunk and was reeling about the room. He turned, saw me, and lurched towards me … I stiffened myself. So the fight was coming already! The next moment the stevedore collapsed on my chest and flung his arms round my neck. “’Ave a cup of tea, chum!” he cried tearfully; “’ave a cup of tea!”

‘I had a cup of tea. It was a kind of baptism. After that my fears vanished.’

But there are caveats to this outpouring. A cup of tea is transitory, and in unforced circumstances so is the connection it offers. We may only need it as a gesture only because British class distinctions are so prevalent and so often reasserted; and that may be why other countries don’t have an analogous beverage. And part of the reason for its social transcendence, the reason no-one feels dispossessed by any of the stereotypes above, is that no one subculture of Britain has ever possessed tea. The irony is, what’s known as ‘English tea’ is a hybrid of foreign varieties made available by the Empire’s kind dispossession of great swathes of the globe. It symbolises the national identity in more than one way: the only drink every British person can agree on contains nothing actually native, but is an indeterminate mixture of imported stuff with no particular flavour. Our tastes are stubbornly conservative: Lipton’s has had to take the same approach as Skoda to get their iced tea into the public eye, cancelling out bad associations (cold tea! Ugh) clouding good qualities. And then the upper classes are held to favour Earl Grey and to have originated of milk/tea debate; and the number of sugars in a cup can be taken as shorthand for how strenuous a manual worker’s job is (how much energy they need), and hence as a mark of social grade. That the Queen’s tastes are so divergent from and so irrelevant to her people isn’t surprising. The more finely you sift the tea, the more it delineates society rather than uniting it.

And then… ‘No particular flavour’? Depending on your viewpoint, English tea is either the most subtle or the most insipid of all teas. It doesn’t taste of very much. (We deserve some credit, at least, for making our tasteless drink as strong as we can. I was repeatedly depressed by European hotels’ version of tea: a tall glass mug of lukewarm water, with - yes - a tiny drawstring bag ready to be dipped, re-dipped and squashed at your leisure as you tried to force some flavour out of it. Milk was an exceptional addition, asked for at risk of bewilderment.) It doesn’t have any pronounced physiological effects: sugar is a matter of taste, and its caffiene content is paltry. Mostly, it stains your teeth (cue British stereotype number two). In the Asterix books, the British tribes are pictured drinking cups of hot water ‘with a spot of milk’: the heroes introduce tea by sprinkling a cauldron with a handful of miscellaneous leaves. But the Britons go on to knock over a few centuries of Romans. Tea’s main boost is psychological: it’s the comestible which marks breaks, rewards work done and spurs towards work still to do. Its thorough integration into daily life increases its effect and partly excuses its appropriation as a British asset. A lack of flavour is secondary, and makes it only the more suitable for universality… among a nation who already drink it. The likelihood of other countries being initiated into our peculiar tradition seems small.

Fifteen of fame, five of fun

2005-11-25T13:49:00.000Z

I keep getting Channel 101 wrong. I enthuse about it, to anyone who’ll listen, as a new paradigm of democratic TV. Creators submit five-minute pilots - runs the spiel I’ve perfected - which are voted on by an audience. The five top-pollers have to make another episode for the next screening, where they’ll compete against a fresh batch of pilots. And it really works, I add; here’s the web address.

None of which is false, but it’s not exactly right. First misinformation: the democracy is limited. Pilots are preselected for the show by a seldom-changing lineup of the successful shows’ creators; only about one in five gets in. Checks on their power - the inclusion of wildcard shows, or the Chauncey, in which any show gets a shot if the creator turns up to explain to the audience why he’s overruling the panel - have been dropped as generating too much aggravation. Plenty of failed submitters have complained that it’s not democratic at all, an Elite and Pals showcase. The objection’s not exactly right either: Chaunceys righted wrong omissions far less than they soothed egos and upheld crappy products.

But neither side of the democratic debate matters, because Channel 101’s lineup is consistently superb. The gift horse is sound in tooth and limb. No-one’s being conned out of a good time, as they would be if democracy was enough of a priority to make the audience sit through the four good-to-poor hours of a full pilot mailbag. The democratic principle only rises to the top of every explanation as all gimmicks tend to do, and – I mean this with full respect for the power and usefulness of gimmickry – a gimmick it is. The point is entertainment. If 101’s a secretly friends-only club, it’s one whose members are sworn on entry to dedicate themselves to fun, and oath-breaking is rare.

The second misinformation’s implied as I scribble down channel101.com on a scrap of paper. Never mind that some of the videos have taken on viral properties, circulating even when legal battles force the originals’ removal or racking up hundreds of thousands of downloads, while screening numbers are limited to the hundreds. On the internet, big numbers count for nothing. It’s the screenings that power the site, not the reverse. The former’s audience are the voters who compel further production; the latter is a publicity arm, its viewers legitimized scavengers. (Making the point, some creators have toyed with the web audience’s hoovering-up of all things 101 by concocting fake hype and fake feuds.) Web viewers - and reviewers - only see a bright shadow of 101’s real workings. The practicalities are different: where the web has as much time as you have, a public show only has limited time, has to be financed, has to entertain. And the aesthetics are different. The shows have to compete for the attention and votes of a merry crowd of diners and drinkers. The same sensibility wins out as in any public medium: loud, simple, geared for full comprehension and impact on the first viewing, regardless of the diminishing returns on repeats. Comedy, sci-fi and horror are staples. Dramas (though not necessarily drama), relying on subtleties of emotion and characterisation, would pale like watercolours next to neons when juxtaposed with laughs, shocks and explosions in the rest of the screenings. So the beautiful Utopia was dropped at episode two. So not one Splu Urtaf pilot has yet made Prime Time. So what? We don’t get to be disappointed to get gifts which weren’t meant for us.

Hypothetically, I mean. If we were to be disappointed.

So, Yacht Rock. On the first viewing, I was disappointed. A parodic biopic strand on such luminaries as the Doobie Brothers and Toto? Right… Yet, oddly, it did start to make sense on the second viewing. By the third I was laughing. For a start, its parody springs from a genuine respect which is infectious. Not the easy ‘wild surrealism’ treatment (Jesus/Lincoln/Hitler - and he’s a cop. Job done), but nicely-skewed stories-behind-the-song of inspiration and rivalry, made all the more entertaining for turning out to be largely factual. It cultivates a distinctive lingo and set of values, which are refined and cemented over the series. It’s gorgeously put together, edited with liberal application of split-screen and wipe, and shot in warm cinematic tones (which serve for a spot-on visual gag in the third episode). It’s full but not over-full of comic touches from a large and talented cast. It’s neither too big nor too small an idea for its timeslot. In fact, it’s 101’s best testament to the viability of the five-minute format, establishing it as the perfect container for jeux d’esprit. On the whole it leaves you with a glow of satisfaction that perfect little creations like this do exist.

And in the blue corner: Shitbuster. Not picked up for series, for reasons which become obvious when you see it, which I recommend you do now… Back? Okay. There are two possible ways you’ve just reacted. While you can list myriad watertight proofs of Yacht Rock’s worth, getting Shitbuster is a matter of sheer personal perversity. I nearly passed out. You may not have been so amused. It’s just… The theme song. The preparations. The routine. The catchphrase. The theme song. (You will be singing this to yourself for at least a week. Again, this may or may not amuse you.) Most of all, the sheer inscrutability of the Shitbuster himself. What? Why? How? Somehow you know he will never, ever stop in his impossible calling. ‘Nnnope!’ It could almost be tragic, except... theme song. Lighting, editing, sound, all technical detail seems irrelevant next to the pristine idiocy-genius of its joke. This is the other pole of 101: the glorious throwaway.

Most series lie somewhere between these extremes of artistry and savantry. The Most Extraordinary Space Investigations cunningly mixes them up. Wafer-thin plotlines, characters handily telegraphing their single personality traits, laughable graphics, absurd music, and a cast who are clearly drunk and/or stoned - except at the editing stage, where the nonsense is expertly assembled into something unbelievably funny. You have to be a conoisseur of tosh, but it’s as good as tosh gets. Then there’s serious action with daft concepts: Laser Fart and Time Belt are more or less self-explanatory concept-wise, but they carry unexpected production values and emotional punch. And there’s high craziness, seemingly superheated by compression into the TV box. Twigger’s Holiday flings you headfirst into a primary-coloured, hyperactive world cluttered with cardboard cars, rayguns, crazy adults and punky singalongs. Adventurous und Magick Haus throws out that show’s coherence for a full-on effects-crazy trip of eye monsters, magic paper and talking houses (which has infected at least one close friend’s brain). It’s all fun. It’s not life-enriching (unless humming the Shitbuster theme counts as enrichment) or educational: shows exploit or poke fun at moral messages more often than they uphold them. The five minute format might have been designed to be evanescent, quickly consumable, disposable. But then, who at the screenings was asking for lasting art? More to the point, who can’t spare five minutes for a shot of pure passive entertainment?

Am I disappointed? ‘Nnnope!’