Penarth Model Railway Show

It's a heatwave, so what better way to stay out of the sun than looking at some model trains? Bryan joined me at the Barry and Penarth Model Railway Club's annual show.

There were a mix of lay-outs ranging from early twentieth century through to modern image. 

Narrow-guage railways were also represented.

There were a few micro-layouts, including one built inside a brie cheese box!

But there were two that really stood out. The first was a monochrome layout paying tribute to the classic film Brief Encounter. It was a very clever lay-out made to look like a black and white movie.

The creator, Rachel Quest, has her own YouTube channel. She also clearly has a sense of humour!

And Bryan and I both really liked Karolina Falls, an American frontier town with a waterfall featuring real water (!) and lots of funny little features including a curious moose!

So, lots of inspiration for if I ever get round to reviving my model railway. 

The 1962 film verson of The Day of the Triffids

During our holiday week, we watched a number of DVDs that we had picked up cheaply in a charity shop. One of them was the film version of The Day of the Triffids released in 1962. In this review I am going to include some spoilers for both the film and the book version of The Day of the Triffids, so if you haven't seen this or read the book and you want to, then stop reading now!

The DVD cover

I am a big fan of John Wyndham's writing and have re-read The Day of the Triffids a few times. He was an elegant writer with a very lean approach to storytelling. There was no unnecessary descriptive text in his work. He got on with the action. When there is exposition in his books, he handles it all very matter-of-fact and tells the reader what the reader needs to know at that point. Sometimes there are hints of the darkness ahead - because there is always darkness ahead - but he doesn't overdo it.

This film was produced about ten years after The Day of the Triffids was first published. And they butchered the book as they turned it into a screenplay. That would be my biggest gripe about it.

I don't really expect much from a 1960s monster movie. The direction was very stagey and unnatural. Sometimes that doesn't matter in a film, but this was clunky. The script was poor. Characters would say things then other characters would say things and what they said didn't necessarily seem to follow on. There was one actress who seemed to only be in the film to scream theatrically when she saw a triffid. (That annoyed me particularly because John Wyndham didn't write his female characters like that - in his books women were usually resourceful, brave, clever and funny. They didn't just stand there screaming.)

The film did some scenes well, particularly cutaway scenes on a cruise liner with everyone struck blind, passengers and crew, and the same with a passenger airplane that was doomed to crash. Those bits were suitably chilling. The rest, not so much. 

It's possible to do an adaptation that sticks to the story. The BBC version from 2009 (which I blogged about here but haven't seen since it was broadcast) was much closer to the book. This film felt like it had been adapted by someone who hadn't really read or understood the book, been given a list of principal characters and told to get on with it. 

The only part that was really close to the book was the opening scenes that established the lead character, Bill, in a hospital bed with his eyes bandaged while everyone else looks at the "meteor" lightshow, and then the following morning when he removes his dressings and discovers everyone else has gone blind. 

The triffids themselves were only mildly menacing monsters in this film. But they are meant to be only mildly menacing because they're plants. They don't run after you even though they can move. It's the ones lurking, hidden in the bushes that get you with their deadly stings. In the first third of the film, the director made good use of not showing the entire monster, just a slimy root on a stair, or a flower betraying the presence of a triffid hiding in with other greenery. But then they became slowly-advancing rubbery aggressors and it was hard to take them seriously. 

There is a great visual sequence where Bill rigs up a flame thrower and torches massed ranks of triffids being held at bay by an electric fence, which is an event that was sort of lifted from the book. It's surprisingly violent, watching the triffids burn. But the action had been so staccato up to that point that the big set piece didn't have any tension to it. The final denouement - with the discovery that seawater could be used to turn triffids into puddles of oozing slime - wasn't part of the book at all. 

Where this film really went wrong was making the triffids space aliens carried on meteors. That's not in the book. Triffids are discovered in an African rainforest and then deliberately farmed for their highly versatile oil. In fact, that's why Bill ends up in hospital having eye surgery in the book - on a visit to a triffid farm one of the plants tries to sting him and some of the venom ends up in his eyes. 

So, the triffids don't arrive on meteors. And, as a further twist, the lights in the sky aren't actually meteors at all! What's revealed in the book is that a satellite had been launched that was a weapon designed to cause blindness, and it had malfunctioned. 

The idea of space-borne weaponry was incredibly forward-thinking in 1951. It was a few years before the first orbiting satellites were launched. It's probably the scariest part of the story - and it's the bit that gets left out of adaptations!

Because the point of The Day of the Triffids is that humans are prone to exploiting very dangerous natural resources, and are very resourceful at thinking up ways to kill other humans, and if something went wrong it could get very nasty. Basically, John Wyndham's message is that we don't need an alien invasion to doom us. Humans are very capable of dooming ourselves. 

John Wyndham did write an alien invasion novel a couple of years later. The Kraken Wakes is an equally vivid story, and possibly edges The Day of the Triffids in both concept and delivery. It hasn't ever been made into a film, but given how film-makers missed the point of the triffids, maybe that's a blessing. 

TV highlights of 2009

The reason for doing this a couple of days into 2010 is that I can talk about David Tennant's last foray as Doctor Who, which occurred on New Year's Day.

Overall I thought the 'double episode' was a bit disappointing. The first half saw a resurrected Master, brought back to life for reasons that were never very clearly explained, and who was some kind of flesh-eating creature to boot, and the plot seemed to build to one joke: the establishment of the "Master Race" as humanity was turned into 6 billion copies of the Master.

The second bit was better, with some more humour, Timothy Dalton as the psychopathic Time Lord leader Rassilon (nice nod to Dr Who lore there), and a bit of pathos. I personally thought the ending was too drawn out, as the Doctor toured time to say goodbye to old friends. And they blatatly ripped off the cantina scene in Star Wars at one point. Still, it was nice to see a Sontaran for a few brief seconds, although how Mickey and Martha became married freelance alien hunters opened up a whole new can of worms.

It's hard to know where Dr Who, with a new Doctor, will go from here, and I have to admit the past year's offerings haven't impressed me much. So what, TV-wise would I say was great about 2009?

I really liked the adaptation of Day Of The Triffids shown just after Christmas. I'm always a bit wary when I watch an adaptation of a book I love. But this one worked for me. True, some bits changed - the convent scene was different, Eddie Izzard's character Torrance was more developed, the tribal mask back story was grafted in along with the hero's Dad. But overall, I think the update worked well.

The thing about Triffids the book is that it's a slow build. Triffids kill people and then wait for the flesh to rot before they eat them. In the TV show dead bodies were absorbed rapidly through rooty tendrils, but I guess that made more effective TV. Also, and a huge bonus point in my book, the Triffids were never aliens originally, so their discovery in darkest Zaire and subsequent breeding for Triffid oil was much more in line with the original story.

So, I thought it worked, although the critics lashed out at it. But as a fan of John Wyndham, it caught the sense of much of his work - that actually we have the capacity as humans to be the architects of our own downfall. That message was nicely played out in this most recent TV work.

I also loved the second series of The Big Bang Theory (the third series has just started too). This is the most recent comedy from creative genius Chuck Lorre (responsible for Dharma and Greg and Two and a Half Men), and ticks the boxes for me of nerdy cultural references and some genuinely funny moments.

I liked the episode where the four geeks met Summer Glau (the girl Terminator from The Sarah Connor Chronicles) on a train and conspired to talk to her. The show has set a high standard for itself, but the episodes of series 3 I've seen so far seem to show a show that is improving with time.

But my favourite telly show of 2009 has to be the second series of Chuck. If you haven't seen Chuck the premise is very silly - Chuck, played by Zachary Levy, is a computer nerd who has a top secret military computer ('the Intersect') downloaded into his brain. He subsequently needs protecting from various bad guys by two federal agents, one of whom is the very lovely Yvonne Strahovski, and the other the snarly Adam Baldwin. And every week something implausibly ridiculous happens that causes chaos in Chuck's life.

The first series of Chuck was cut short by the Hollywood writer's strike, so series 2 is the first full-length one. It got a little bit dafter as it went on, with a huge undercover evil operation (headed up by Chevy Chase no less!) that reminded me of Alias. But it was entertaining every week and series 3 is coming down the track. Yipee.

Other stuff I've enjoyed this year:
The QI Christmas special, and QI generally
Mock the Week, 
Rules of Engagement (import on Comedy Central) has had it's moments
'2 Good, 2 Bad' on Match of the Day 2 - possibly the funniest regular bit on any regular sports programme
Major League Baseball coverage on ESPN America (after the demise of Setanta Sports)

I didn't bother with Big Brother this year (who did?) and I tried to tune out the X Factor after the first couple of weeks. And, frankly, I was too busy having a life to get into any of the 'reality' shows.