Finally finished Farscape!

Yes, we have finally frelling finished Farscape! 23 years after I first watched most of the first season on BBC2, I can tick this series off. 

Sometime towards the end of last year, I was reminiscing about Farscape. Cathy bought me a copy of the DVD box set for Christmas. Unfortunately, it was on a region-specific DVD and we didn't have a multi-region DVD player. However, these days DVD players are old technology and we could buy a new multi-region DVD player at minimal cost.  So once that had arrived and we had set it up... we could start watching the show from the beginning of the first series again. 

The basic premise of Farscape is an accident befalling an astronaut called John Crichton who is testing a new spaceship, the Farscape Module. The ship unexpectedly causes a wormhole in space, his ship passes through it, and then on the other side of the galaxy he meets a bunch of different aliens who have all similarly been uprooted from their lives. Thrown together, they gradually become his loyal friends. Well, loyal-ish. They often have their own agendas and aren't always trustworthy.  

One of the things I liked about Farscape when I first saw it was its use of puppet creations made by the Jim Henson Creature Shop. While they still had recognisably humanoid tendencies, including two front-facing eyes, noses and mouths in roughly human proportions, the diminutive Rygel and the hulking Pilot who was embedded into the living spaceship, Moya, both looked properly alien. The rest of Moya's alien inhabitants were all people in make up or latex masks as is pretty standard in science fiction series. The one exception is a very human looking character called Aeryn Sun, a female "Sebacean" who becomes the love interest for Crichton as the seasons progress. 

Personally, I felt the puppets still worked. However, there is also plenty of grainy CGI, which was ground-breaking in the late 90s and early noughties but looks distinctly dated now. The quality of each episode is variable. Some are tightly scripted and have a clear story arc. Others are looser in their approach and seem to have characters wandering around for no discernible reason other than to kill a few minutes of runtime. 

However, the show had some neat ideas. When Crichton first arrives on Moya he's immediately injected with "translator microbes" that explain how he can understand all the other aliens. The idea of a spaceship that is mainly organic and genetically engineered is still novel. The show also developed its own vocabulary of swear words. "Frel" was an obvious replacement for an English word beginning with f. There was also "dren" which roughly translated to crap, and "tralk" which correlated loosely with slut. 

The show managed to avoid being too cliched. There are quasi-fascist bad guys (the ironically named Peacekeepers) but that didn't drift into a rebellion versus empire scenario, and there are competing factions and races who are neither better nor worse options. There is also a spiritual element to the show, with an apostate priest called Zhaan as one of the main characters. Throughout the show there are hints of an afterlife and another plane of existence inhabited by the souls of the dead.

I'm not going to do a full plot summary, but the first two series have a lot more self-contained episodes, although the storylines are common to science-fiction series - there's a body-swap episode, an episode where a character gets marooned and ages in comparison to the rest of the shipmates, a planet where one of the characters is revered as a god, a planet where a character accidentally gets married and so on. Just about every science fiction series has some or all of these events occurring in some way. 

Midway through season two a definite story arc emerges. A new principle baddie, Scorpius, comes to the fore and he has a reason for relentlessly pursuing Crichton. The show also begins to focus more on Crichton's quest to get home. Seasons three and four explore this further, with Crichton having to decide whether he dare jeopardise the safety of Earth by returning. Season four ends on a cliff-hanger with Crichton and Aeryn turned into glass beads by an alien weapon. 

However, that was the last episode of the last season. The story could have been left on that very dark note, but two feature length TV movies - The Peacekeeper Wars - followed. These weren't included in the box-set but I was able to pick them up off eBay very cheaply before we got to the end of season 4, so we watched them straight after the season finished. 

I wasn't hugely impressed with the feature length episodes. There was some closure to the main story arc regarding accessing wormholes. However, the plot revolved around using a hidden race of aliens who could create some kind of aura that would make antagonists seek peaceful resolutions and that all just got a bit convoluted and contrived. Along the way one of the main characters died a heroic death which sadly felt a bit meaningless by the end of the film, given the way Crichton eventually forced all the warring races to back down and accept peace or be annihilated by a weaponised wormhole. 

However, overall, I'm glad I can now say I have watched the entire show. There were definitely some good stories, particularly in the first two series. Claudia Black, who played Aeryn Sun, captured the character of a Peacekeeper commando abandoned by her own kind magnificently and was probably the strongest and most interesting character across the entire run of the series. There was a lot of humour throughout as well and it was darkly amusing how every single plan went wrong in some way. Weirdly, that made it feel a lot more realistic than a science fiction TV show with rubber-mask aliens ever should!

Nostalgia Triggers from 90s Choons

I usually listen to the radio when I'm doing stuff in the kitchen. With the world generally being pretty dreadful I've been avoiding news-based stations and so have retuned the radio to Absolute Radio 90s, which just plays songs from the 1990s, triggering memories from two thirds of my life ago.

Photo taken in Paris in 1993 or 1994

For example, when The Size of a Cow by The Wonderstuff comes on, then I'm transported back to sitting at the heavy lab desk at the back of Mr Dorricott's science classroom. My desk-mate, Tim, was really into The Wonderstuff and a lot of other music. He used to go on the train to Birmingham to buy "choons". He pirated me a cassette of Nevermind. I remember once at my house my tape player chewed up his tape of Achtung! Baby and when we cut and pasted the tape back together we put one bit back in the wrong way round. Unintentional remixes of our time.

(This will all mean nothing to anyone under the age of 30, probably. Tapes? What are those?)

Another song that is on heavy rotation on AR90s is Parklife by Blur. I have a very specific memory related to this. Back when that song came out I used to go to a church that met in an upper complex of rooms above a pub. During Sunday evening meetings you could hear the music playing in the pub downstairs. Sunday evening meetings were generally informal, and I remember one evening we had moved the chairs round into small circles to pray in groups. Through the floor came the thudding beats of Parklife. I wasn't the only one in the prayer circle mentally singing along.

All the people
So many people
And they all go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
(beat)
Parklife

I know I wasn't the only one singing along because a few of us mouthed the word 'Parklife' in time with the song. We saw each other do it and grinned.

And then I left Shrewsbury to go to university, just as the Britpop bubble exploded. Anything by Oasis or Shed 7 or Elastica reminds me of university days. Basket Case makes me think of my digs in the first year when one of the first things I bought was a CD player that I cobbled into my hi-fi amp and double tapedeck. But those are later days and moving to Cardiff for Uni, to living here afterwards is more of a continuum. When I left Shrewsbury to go to university I ended up never going back there to live, not even for a summer holiday. So that is the one clear page break in my story.

It's the songs from the early 90s that are the real nostalgia triggers, but that's not to say I particularly want to wallow in that nostalgia. Looking back it's a wonder I got through those teenage years as I was barely coping with undiagnosed depression, was a fervent religious fundamentalist, and had the weight of expectations on me to go to university and achieve great things.

That last one is hard to reconcile with the great love I had (and still have) for my father, but he did tell me how he thought I could follow in his footsteps and study medicine, and one reason I went to study theology is because I knew Dad would approve of that choice when medicine was closed off to me (more on that later).

Understanding depression more as an adult, I can see how it affected me quite a bit as a teenager. I know I'm not unique in finding teenage life hard. Recently I have reconnected with a few people I knew in school and realised that I wasn't the only one who was presenting a brave face. Some of the people I most admired have told me they felt constantly on edge, or were hiding an eating disorder, or were bullied as badly as I sometimes was, if not worse.

I think it would have been good for my fragile, nervous self when I was younger, if I had known that the people who seemed to have got their stuff together were actually feeling just as desperate on the inside.

For me, my depression has left me with some regrets. I dropped friendships that I wish I hadn't. It affected my concentration and my ability to focus on schoolwork, and dampened down my love of learning. I barely read some of my textbooks at A-Level. It's stuff I sometimes wish I had actually learned. It also stopped me from learning new skills. I was very keen to learn how to play guitar, went through a depressive phase, sold the guitar to a classmate, and I still occasionally wish that I had been in a mental place where I could have actually learned to play it.

I had almost zero self-confidence, which was also linked to the depression. Here's a story that illustrates it. I was planning on studying science at A-Level, with the end aim of applying for medical school. I went on an open day to the VI Form College and went to the science labs. My school had switched that year from single subject science GCSEs to a "Double Science" course that covered all three subjects and gave you two GCSE grades at the end.

When the science teacher heard this, he was very dismissive. "Oh," he said, "you won't be able to do A-Levels unless you've done single subjects at GCSE. Most people find the step up really hard anyway, so it will be almost impossible for you!"

I remember feeling absolutely shocked by that. There was no point trying if it was going to be impossible. So I went and did three other subjects instead.

For a long time I was angry that my school had made me do double science, because that had prevented me from going on and potentially becoming a doctor like my dad. But it wasn't the school, and it wasn't even that discouraging response from the A-Level teacher who was to blame.

It was only recently I thought to myself, 'Why did I let someone I had never met before shape my choices in such a way?' Without sounding disrespectful, he was just a bog-standard teacher in a run of the mill VI Form College in a half-horse town. In what way was he an authority? He had never met me and he had no clue whether I was any good at science or not.

That encounter could have gone another way. I could have ignored him and had a go. I got Double As in my Double Science (despite mainly talking to Tim about music) so clearly I had some ability.

Besides, every A-Level teacher reckons their subject is really hard and requires a lot of work. If I turned up in that class and I was behind the curve, then a good teacher would find a way to bring me up to speed, rather than writing off my chances before I'd started the course.

But when you're depressed and you feel that everything is a struggle, you don't respond to negativity like that in a positive way. It doesn't spur you on to try hard and prove them wrong, which is how I wish I had responded.

You have to be careful with wishes like that though. If I hadn't been so discouraged by that guy, I wouldn't have ended up studying theology. Even, if I hadn't been depressed and had studied and got the A-level grades I wanted to get, I wouldn't have ended up studying theology in Cardiff. My life would have had a very different trajectory and although I was in a pretty tough place then, I'm in a good place now. Happier than a lot of people, and, I hope, doing a bit of good in the world.

It all worked out. It could have been an easier route, though.

I'm going to stick with listening to Absolute Radio 90s because in a strange way hearing those songs has helped me rearrange some mental furniture and appreciate my journey from then to now.

This is how a groom and his groomsmen make an entrance at a wedding

One of the real highlights of last year was being asked to be Best Man for one of my best friends, all-round creative bright spark and fairly decent graphic designer, Matt, as he married the lovely Lauren.

One of the things I really had in mind as Best Man was a shot for us groomsmen, because one of the things about weddings is that there are usually lots of shots, quite rightly, of the bride and the bridesmaids, but you don't often get memorable shots of the male side of the wedding shenanigans.

I'm not a photographer, although I have many friends who are, but I do know a bit about creating images that will work. I've run some photo-shoots for work purposes and had a clear idea of what I want the photos to end up looking like. Some photographers listen to you and some don't. Fortunately Matt had booked the former type - when I explained what I wanted, he knew exactly what I meant. (Personally, after working with many photographers, I would say that what sets the real pros apart from the rest, but that's just my opinion.)

Anyway, as I explained to the photographer, I wanted something reminiscent of this - probably one of the most iconic (if not the iconic) movie posters of the 1990s.

 That image of a group of suited and booted guys on their way to complete a job. (but perhaps looking a bit happier.)

(Amusingly, one of the groomsmen, Lauren's littlest brother, had no idea what we were talking about as Reservoir Dogs came out about ten years before he was born. Which didn't make me feel old at all...)

Anyway, it took a few shots, but we got there in the end.

Yeah. Nailed it.