Faulty engineering killed the radio star (temporarily)

Yesterday, I had Radio 4 on in the background as I laid resting on my bed, when come 1oam and Woman's Hour, after the news bulletin, that most feared of radio phenomena - dead air - silently made its presence felt; like dark matter, noticeable by the absence of anything else and so the proving of a negative. A nervous presenter came on and made a few bland somnolences. after the second time of failure, we were given Oscar Peterson and his jazz band, which I found far preferable to Woman's Hour. After a few minutes, the audibly wincing presenter returned, hoping for "third time lucky," but after the gathering of a few more seconds of radio dust, the man behind the microphone joked of "the best-laid plans of mice and men," the inability to contact the Woman's Hour studio and suggested we enjoy more of Oscar Peterson. I can just imagine the invective flying as the engineers try to fix the problem. Also, because Woman's Hour is a magazine programme, I wondered what itme would be cut or held over for next week. Whatever, Jenny Murray got off with less work than she expected. Eventually, after a good ten minutes had elapsed following the news (and a second tune required of Oscar, who did rather well out of this fault), the male presenter enjoined us now to enjoy Woman's Hour, but the drama was over - as I was curious as to how long it would last - and caused me to more deeply engage with my pillow.

Professor Tim Luckhurst was on the BBC Ten o'clock News last night. He gave a commanding performance. Alright, I only took interest because it was "Prof Tim Luckhurst, Chair of Journalism, University of Kent." I can't remember what he said, nor what the subject was about, since I was reading a newspaper at the time, but he said it well and it arrested my attention for as long as he was on screen, with a busy news studio behind him. He still had time to pop into his university office though. I know he was being a rent-an-expert, paid to give a few soundbites to encapsulate the arguments of the article, but at least he was deemed worthy of getting a call at all. It was classic television researcher student graduate stuff - present a case for transmission, get a few shots from the day to flesh it out and bump in a reference from an esteemed source. The visual equivalent of a pithy essay.

I also watched the film Van Helsing, known in the trade as an 'action-adventure' flick. It was on ITV, a channel I don't usually watch, but the adverts did allow me to switch over to catch a glimpse of Dame Stella Rimmington's 'insights' into Britain's relations to Russia; I guessed it wouldn't tell me much that I didn't know already and the atmospheric padding - archetypal for a programme with not enough substantive material - confirmed as much.
Van Helsing was a bit of puff-fun, if ludricously overblown; it was more enjoyable than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which also used figures from Late Victoriana (though Van Helsing was more wide-ranging, using horror characters whose origins range across the nineteenth century). VH was not as linear and the villains essentially don't remain undisturbed in their plans until the final showdown. Van Helsing is supposed to be a paranormal-busting James Bond; he's actually the Archangel Gabriel who for some reason is suffering for memory loss - a plot hole the film never fully covers, but brazenly acknowledges all the same. Maybe if a franchise had been the result we would have been given more hints.
Written by Stephen Sommers who also directed, there are some notorious geographical gaffes. Transylvania in the late 1880s was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Romania, as the cardinal in charge of a Vatican organisation more opaque than Opus Dei says. If one were to travel to land-locked mountainous Transylvania by sea, as anyone who's seen Nosferatu knows, you would go via the Black Sea before the short overland hop rather than the Adriatic Sea (maybe the producers said, nah, who's going to believe in a horror film that there's such a place as the Black Sea). Moreover, there's a line journey across a map, reminiscent of Indiana Jones' secenarios that would be set fifty years hence; therefore, maps are pretty advanced in the 1880s and one would not cross south over the Carpathian mountains to get directly to Budapest (maybe Sommers confused it with Belgrade, which fits exactly the map location where Budapest is scrawled). Another mistake is that a summer palace is not built where summer would be at its hottest - a winter palace would be built in Budapest and a summer one on the Transylvania plateau, where the air would be cooler taking something away from the savage summer heat, but the multiplex twerps aren't going to know that.
Ironically, for a movie that could amply justify filming within the modern-day frontiers of Romania, most of it seems CGI-driven. there must have been plenty of green acreen acting. Hugh Jackman dons a muscular English accent, since in Hollywood, anyone of any stature before the 'American Century' of the 20th, must be English, suggesting a classical age (unless Sean Connery is cast and then its an Edinburgh dialect). Kate Beckinsale stars in another trash film and puts on her very best Eastern European voice - at least it doesn't sound sub-Russian. She has impossibly good hair throughout, even on the very untypically Christian funeral pyre (I know the dastardly undertaker was taken out mid-way through the film, but still, isn't anyone else good with a shovel?). I wonder what her late thesp dad Richard would have made of her career.
In another irony, in that it has nothing to with the originality of imagination of the movie itself, the classiest moment of the film is the homage to the James Whale's 1930s classic, Frankenstein, with the burning windmill. There were a few intriguing touches, such as Van Helsing's equivalent of 007's Q accompanying the eponymous hero's quest and one of Dracula's brides in human form was dressed much like a Turkish harem dancer, evoking memory of the historical Dracula's wars against the Ottomans. As is the modern way, Dracula can no longer be killed simply with a wooden stake through the heart or exposure to sunlight; no, it takes something grandiose in a stab at originality to finish off the orginal vampire. There is also a very humourously absurd part played by a (completely-CGI?) cow, during an action scene, though one wonders how it looked so well minutes after being thrown through the wooden wall of a building (and would it be contaminated?). I guess Van Helsing didn't do well enough at the box office to merit a sequel (and do computer geeks really get paid so much to create these digital images), but was good, silly fun.