Trinity researchers publish important findings on delirium
May 3rd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
New findings from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) researchers studying the neuropsychiatric syndrome of delirium have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience this week, uncovering important interactions between inflammation and brain chemistry that may contribute to its onset. The research relates to the two competing theories of delirium, and may reconcile the two approaches.
Delirium is a common psychiatric disorder that manifests as sudden and profound disturbance of attention, memory, and behaviour. Delirium can be caused by many different events, such as an infection, surgery or a change in medication. There has been much research carried out to resolve the different theories on delirium, including the “cholinergic hypothesis”, which proposes that decreased levels or activity of acetylcholine are responsible for the deficits observed, and the “neuroinflammatory hypothesis”, which proposes that inflammation in the brain causes the disturbance of brain function.
The results published by researchers in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, led by Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow Dr Colm Cunningham, may solve this problem. The findings show that inflammation which arises in the body as a result of an infection triggers a profound disturbance of short-term memory. This occurs only in animals who previously exhibited destruction of the brain cells that normally synthesise the chemical messenger acetylcholine in cholinergic cells. However, it is now known that neither inflammation nor cholinergic cell loss are sufficient individually to cause this disturbance, indicating that these two factors must combine to produce the delirium-like state. Findings also show that the delirium could be partially reversed by treatment with donepezil, a drug that slows down the breakdown of acetylcholine. Therefore, systemic inflammation can induce these cognitive impairments only in individuals with so-called cholinergic vulnerability.
Speaking about the importance of these findings Dr Cunningham explained that “while much has been hypothesised about risk factors and triggers of delirium, this study offers clear evidence for the interaction of two of these factors to produce brain dysfunction and as such it offers potential routes to preventing or treating this devastating condition.”
The publication has also been heralded by Professor Alasdair MacLullich, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and President of the European Delirium Association.
“Delirium causes enormous suffering and costs billions of pounds, but it is hardly researched and there are no treatments. Dr Cunningham’s exciting study provides critical new knowledge on the mechanisms explaining how two causes of delirium well known to clinicians, cholinergic deficiency and inflammation, may combine to produce this devastating syndrome. This is an important step forward and takes the field closer to developing drug treatments.”
Hacked off
May 3rd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
With the recent arrest of an Irish student for hacking, Emer Sugrue takes a look at the trend of incompetence in technology, and the treatment of those who expose it.
While hacking is not as glamorous or all-powerful as portrayed in fiction, it is still a problem faced by official institutions. Last month Donncha O’Cearbhaill, a first-year Trinity student, was arrested for allegedly hacking into and recording a conference call between the FBI and SOCA, the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. The call was to discuss international plans for dealing with the hacking groups Anonymous and Lulzsec, of which O’Cearrbhaill is a member, and he duly put the contents of the exchange on Youtube. He has been charged in the US with one count of computer hacking conspiracy and one of ‘intentionally disclosing an unlawfully intercepted wire communication’, facing up to fifteen years in prison if found guilty. For context, the average time served for murder in Ireland is twelve years.
This was not O’Cearbhaill’s first offence. Last year he hacked into the Department of Foreign Affairs simply by guessing their passwords. Three of the passwords used by these government officials was ‘password’. The alleged hacking above stretched Mr. O’Cearbhaill’s supernatural hacking skills even further. The Gardaí have an email system designed specially by the foreign consultancy firm Accenture at a cost to taxpayers of sixty-one million euro, which is apparently so faulty that it is standard practice to forward emails to private unsecured Gmail accounts, which is what one hapless member of the Gardaí’s Computer Crime Investigation Unit did with the details of the conference call. O’Cearbhaill already had access to this Garda’s account because he had, once again, guessed the password.
The question is not whether it was illegal or even wrong; of course it was. It’s the digital equivalent of breaking into the Taoiseach’s office just to tip-ex “HA HA HA” on his desk. But if the person breaking in was a security expert and Enda Kenny didn’t know how a door worked, there might be a better use for the burglar than letting him rot.
This astonishing level of technical misunderstanding is endemic in world institutions. The generation in charge has very little understanding of computers, despite the huge number of social and criminal interactions that take place through them. This was not a dedicated terrorist organisation using the information to blackmail or destroy, it was a bored teenager doing it for a laugh. The CCIU not only couldn’t stop him, they couldn’t choose a more inventive password than ‘password’. The huge gaping flaws in the system have been exposed with no malice, and instead of making an effort to fix the system, they are throwing the people who revealed it in jail.
If this is the kind of lazy incompetence at the highest levels of our state, it’s hardly surprising that that same generation of people managed to destroy the country. We have seen the institutions of this country collapse around our ears in the last five years. They have mismanaged the government, the banks, the hospitals, and the police, and we are the ones who have to pay for their stupidity. We are the ones who face unemployment, fees, pay cuts, and tax increases to cover for the mistakes they have made. And when someone comes forward and reveals that the emperor has no clothes, they are punished. We are in a society that always shoots the messenger.
This isn’t corruption, it’s incompetence. Corruption isn’t good, but it implies that the corrupt are at least able to achieve something if given proper motivation. Incompetence is worse, because it can’t be either fixed or deterred. If we continue this tactic of shutting up whoever dares to show a flaw in the system, whether it is in law enforcement, government, or finance, we are doomed to repeat these mistakes over and over again. In the lead-up to the economic crisis many people cried out about what was going on, and how it couldn’t last, and they were silenced and scoffed at. Do we need a technological crisis before hackers are taken seriously?
Here’s a suggestion for any institution finding themselves hacked: Hire the hackers. Hire the people who find the loopholes; they clearly understand the system better than you do. Hacking is not as thrilling or mighty as it is often portrayed to be. It’s not a femme fatale in a catsuit fighting to recover her identity, it’s not a Hollywood nerd who’s only pretension to intellectualism or unattractiveness is a pair of glasses, nervously typing in an abandoned warehouse, ready to pull a gun out when the bad guys arrive, and it’s not a terrorist group trying to take down the indulgent bourgeoisie. Hacking is some teenager dicking around on a laptop while drinking Revamp, and if he can outwit a system purpose-built by highly paid officials, they are the ones who are at fault.
Buyer beware
February 23rd, 2012 § 2 Comments
Every year advertisers get more skilled at saying nothing. They have long since learned that making specific claims can only lead to trouble – an ad for Johnson & Johnson’s RoC Complete Lift was banned for claims that its effectiveness was ‘clinically proven’ when it was discovered that the ‘trial’ had just forty-one participants and a survey – and so instead, they depend on nonsense phrases and meaningless assurance. Recently however, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has been cracking down even further and tackling the issue of the misleading imagery that more or less defines modern advertising.
Earlier this month L’Oreal came under fire for their anti-wrinkle cream ad featuring English actress Rachel Weisz looking wrinkle-free and glowing. Too glowing, as it turns out, as the actress had been heavily photoshopped. Following the ruling, an ASA spokesman released a statement explaining that the “image had been altered in a way that substantially changed her complexion to make it appear smoother and more even. We therefore concluded that the image in the ad … misleadingly exaggerated the performance of the product in relation to the claims ‘skin looks smoother’ and ‘complexion looks more even.’”
Of course the Advertising Standards Agency’s job is to investigate complaints about the accuracy of ads, but do these standards go too far? Yes, the forty-something Rachel Weisz appeared with a face so smoothed back that she looked like she was accelerating at 200 kilometres an hour, but the ad was not in any way a lie. The vague promises of smoother skin and even complexion are true. They are actually true of any moisturiser, regardless of cost. All moisturisers serve the same function and there is little to no evidence that those specifically promoted as anti-aging have any extra effect. But the ad didn’t claim that it was better than other moisturisers, just that it was good. Often these ads back this up with a survey showing that eighty per cent of the women they gave some free face cream to thought it was great. It’s meaningless, but not false.
The majority of advertisements are either bland statements of fact or suggestive promises pasted over aspirational imagery. Perfume ads are the best example of the trend. Not one perfume ad mentions what the product is supposed to smell like. Instead they are a montage of aspiration and wish fulfilment. Men’s ads feature aloof, handsome, mysteriously shirtless men with just the right amount of stubble finding stunning women throwing themselves at their feet. Women’s ads show models draped in silk with said aloof shirtless men in an agony of love, lust, angst and whatever other sexy emotions the Twilight series have popularised, and you could have this life too if only you gave Calvin Klein your money. Could this sort of advertising be banned by the ASA? The imagery is definitely misleading. All a purely factual ad can promise is that if you buy this bottle of smell, you will smell like this smell.
But don’t we know all this? We have been exposed to advertising since we were infants being raised by our square luminous parent, television. We live in the real world; we know that these things aren’t true. There are too many years of eventually buying the toy you so desperately yearned for and finding out that it doesn’t really fly. Drinking a bottle of coke and discovering that instead of teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony, all it does is make you need a wee. Realising that Frosties being “Gr-r-reat!” is more of an opinion than a fact. While advertising makes us spend money on underwhelming products, it also teaches us a valuable lesson: scepticism.
By the time you are an adult you should know that what advertisements promise are impossibilities. They don’t just promise a smell or food or an item of clothing; they promise to make you the person you want to be. They are selling ‘cool’. We want the lifestyle of the ad, not the product. The reason they don’t attempt to explain what the perfume smells like is that it doesn’t matter. No cologne is going to turn you into Matthew McConaughey, and no moisturiser is going to make you look like Rachel Weisz. Even Rachel Weisz doesn’t look like Rachel Weisz, so you have no chance. And if you’ve reached the stage of needing anti-aging cream without realising this, then you deserve to lose your money on pointless products. Consider it a tax on the gullible.
Steven Moffat Interview: The Full Transcript
February 21st, 2012 § 2 Comments
I’ve decided to publish my full interview with Steven Moffat, both because of the great interest shown in the original article on the University Observer site and to demonstrate what a lovely funny man Moffat really is. With the strict deadline and word count for the paper I had to leave out a huge amount of the interview, and since I didn’t feel most UCD students would be at the same level of awe of the man’s work as me, I left out all the most interesting, in-depth and fan-wanky parts. I’ve interviewed a good few people over my years as a student journalist, but this is the first time I interviewed someone I was a huge fan of, and ended the conversation an even bigger fan.
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You started out writing for kids, and now you’re writing kids and adult shows. Is it a big difference writing for the two age groups?
In all honesty, no, I’ve never even thought about it, I really really don’t, I don’t have to think about it which possibly says something about my immaturity. I don’t know, Sherlock is really loved by kids as well actually, I’m not absolutely certain that the doctor who audience and the Sherlock audience are as different as people might like to imagine. I was a little bit alarmed when they moved back the last episode to nine o’clock because that’s slightly too late for kids to watch it, and while we don’t make it for, it obviously more about an adult, more adult than Doctor Who, at the same time I’m always careful not to include anything, you know, you can push the envelope a bit but you don’t make it unwatchable by kids, there’s nothing my kids wouldn’t watch in it.
At the same time, it’s quite different from something like Coupling which is very much in the adult camp, I would say.
It is very much in the adult camp but compared to my children’s shows, so much more immature! The characters in Press Gang, my kids show years ago, were far more grown up than the ones in Coupling. That’s not to criticise Coupling, I love Coupling, you’ve got more licence I suppose when you’re talking to adults, but if I had my time again I think I would have made Coupling more mainstream, because there’s a lot of very funny shows in there that kids can’t watch. The Man with Two Legs was a very funny show, my son would love it I’m sure, but its just a bit too naughty. But with just a little bit more inventiveness and a little bit of cover phrasing you could make that show for a mainstream audience as opposed to a niche audience. What is the point of addressing a smaller section of the audience, and god knows kids love telly, so actually stopping them watching is stupid.
It seems more and more cartoons and films try to have things adults would like.
Oh absolutely, I think it’s the new growth area, you have to realise that the remote control probably isn’t controlled by the adult male in the household, it’s probably controlled by the woman or the children, and so, and god knows Sherlock is; probably the first time that the Sherlock Holmes demographic has been female skewed but it’s remarkable. I mean, generally speaking it hasn’t been something that appealed to women greatly, Sherlock Holmes, but it does seem to be now.
Possibly Benedict Cumberbatch is influential there…
Yeah but he’s not the first handsome man to play Sherlock Holmes oddly enough. He could be one of the younger ones. It’s odd. It wasn’t like, in all fairness, anyone was salivating over Benedict before he was Sherlock Holmes, its a meeting of part and actor I think that makes geeky sexy.
And people always seem to be in love with whoever plays Doctor Who no matter who they are, what age they are or what they look like.
That’s right, how could you not be in love with that lovely man? The Doctor might be weird looking but they’re generally also quite good looking.
Do you find there’s a difference in writing comedy to drama?
I don’t think there is really. I don’t think there’s any excuse really, unless you’re making people cry then you should be making them laugh. I wrote comedy before I officially wrote comedy because press gang was always funny. I honestly don’t change the approach very much at all, the difference is when you’re doing a sitcom is you’re actually thinking ‘they’ve got to be laughing on this page and this page and this page’.
You’re more counting the punchlines
Yeah, but you know I, this year because I made the other two much darker than scandal Scandal [in Belgravia]; there are a lot of laughs in Scandal, the first half an hour particularly is very funny. Not as funny as a comedy, it practically is a comedy after the first , well probably the first half I think is funny, before it darkens slightly.
Part of the reason I think Doctor Who and Sherlock are so funny is because it seems like a serious programme and then the jokes come. So it’s not like you sit down thinking ‘right, I expect this many laughs’, there’s a back and forth, there’s tension and then there’s a joke
Yeah that does help, I think comedy sits better in a drama, the way its sits in life, really, but then successful comedies come often from dramatic elements. The line can be blurred because comedy is an artificial distinction unless you’re actually talking about a comedian, if you’re talking about narrative comedy then it is just story telling.
Do you find it easier when the pressure is off to be funny?
I just write whatever I want to write, I mean, comedy is very very hard indeed but then I think I’m quite good at it! I’m always joking, I think it’s probably my default.
Do you draw on personal experiences at all when writing Doctor Who or Sherlock?
There’s not very much personal experience involved in Sherlock! The only aspect of my personal experience is I’ve always been a huge Sherlock Holmes fan and a huge Doctor Who fan so it feels like these are artefacts from my own past. Which I’m now bizarrely enough taking control of, hurrah. Not a lot of personal experience in that.
When writing, where do you start? Do you start with the characters or storyline?
Well, both. It’s very different for each show. With Doctor Who I’m thinking of how I can get people to be scared I suppose: what’s the monster this week, what’s the adventure, what’s the fastest way we can start the story, how soon can I get Matt Smith running is probably the focus there. With Sherlock it’s different because Mark and I sit around wondering which one are we going to do this year, which bits of the original haven’t been touched. There’s quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes that hasn’t been touched. We’ve had very considerable success just by mining the bits people don’t usually do, and pointing out the bits… I mean we got such credit for having the first time we see Benedict as Sherlock Holmes he’s flogging a corpse, and people said how amazing and clever we were but the truth is the first time Sherlock Holmes is mentioned in the first Sherlock Holmes story that’s exactly what he’s doing. We just nicked it from the original.
With a such a frame to hang it on, is it easier to start Sherlock than other things?
It’s never easy to start, it just never is. And they’re both quite intensively, um… plotted I suppose, because things have to happen in them, you don’t really have a lot of chat, you have to get on with it. At the same time people are in love with that relationship between Holmes and Watson so you need that. It’s very enjoyable, I love both these shows but they’re tough to do.
With each episode at 90 minutes, the length of a film, it must be very difficult to balance all the different elements
I quite like the longer length, I’m not absolutely sure the longer length is harder to do. I think the longer length in some ways is a blessing because, I mean, I think I spend most of my life trying to get Doctor Who episodes down to 45 minutes and that can be really really tough. Whereas, you know, when I was doing Scandal this year it was deliberately set over a year so you got a big chunk of their lives. Things like the Christmas day scene would never make it into a normal length episode because its just a bit of indulgence, no doubt could be called self indulgent! But the 90 minutes allows you that degree of character, in effect. And character is very important in that show.
After Jekyll and Sherlock, what’s your next Victorian adaptation?
Its honestly not the plan, I never intended to do this. Jekyll was actually someone else’s idea that I took on, Jeffrey Taylor’s, but honestly I…generally speaking I’ve always turned down adaptations but I suppose its sort of cumulative isn’t it? Doctor Who and Sherlock were the two big ones for me, and I did love Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a kid but I doubt there’s another one. The next thing I do will be original. God knows when that will be, the amount of work I’ve got to do but you know, it’ll be something else.
Was it difficult getting the complexities of the different characters from the original books? A lot of adaptations turn Watson into a fat bumbling idiot, completely different to his personality in the books
I have to say, that’s Nigel Bruce and I have to say that fat bumbling idiot he was but by god he was a brilliant fat bumbling idiot! He was so funny.
With Watson the problem is when you remove the narrator function from him. Because he’s really just the ideal audience for Sherlock Homes in the book, you actually have to do something more with him. Our Dr Watson is very sardonic and sarky and funny, but if you actually look at the original Dr Watson he isn’t; he’s endless credulous, constantly amazed, not quite Nigel Bruce but nonetheless has an epic ability to be wrong about everything.
He’s not as thick as he can sometimes be presented but he is comically astonished by Sherlock Holmes’ deductions for the entire thirty years of their friendship, you think at a certain point he might know Sherlock Holmes has probably got this one. Not saying ‘You cant possibly know that Holmes!’, not three decades in!
We’ve got an actor like Martin Freeman and I think the thing that’s important for Dr Watson is that he’s definitely hugely competent; he’s not any kind of genius but he’s a very competent military man, and a good doctor with a stout heart and the best friend you could want and the first man a genius would trust which is a huge complement; a genius chooses him. A genius who understands everything about everybody chooses John to be the man he trusts. So that’s about as big a complement as you can get really.
Sherlock makes great use of modern technology, how hard was that to write in when adapting the show?
Well to be honest, it’s not very hard. We just decided we were going to update him properly, he’d be a modern man because he’s a modern man in the Victorian version, he’s always using newfangled things like telegrams. He’s someone who appreciates and enjoys technology, he’s a bit of a science boffin, he’s a geek, he would do all those things. I just think it’s fun, I don’t think all the fantastic tech we’ve got limits story telling, I think you can use it in all sorts of ways.
I suppose you see the lack of technology more in horror, making excuses for why the characters don’t just call the police.
The eternal problem is ‘Why don’t they just phone the police?’, that’s going to haunt every drama because the explanation will always be dull. But I’m sure we’ll fall foul of that some day.
I can’t imagine Sherlock Holmes calling the police
He wouldn’t, just on a point of principle! At the same time I cant help thinking that we’ll probably use that as the big twist, why didn’t he just call the police, he also has no intention of dying so…
Who is the lonelier character, the Doctor or Sherlock?
I think the Doctor, because the Doctor actually does crave company, I don’t think Sherlock really does. I think people get under his skin and I think possibly without him even realising so John and Mrs Hudson definitely, he’s very fond of her, and he’s actually terribly fond of Lestrade. He doesn’t know it yet but he is. I think he got to him in a way he hadn’t been got to before. It just sort of happened. And it happened in the stories too.
He wants to be a calculating machine but he really isn’t. He really absolutely properly isn’t. He’s a quite a moody, difficult, emotional man is the truth, even in the original, and its really fascinating to read the real Doyle and you realise if he thinks a man has wronged a women he’s dragging a riding crop off the wall to beat him up ’cause he’s so angry. He’s actually not at all cold and aloof, he just wants to be and presents that way, but he isn’t, he isn’t at all. But he would like to be.
Is there anything linking the two show, for instance both the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes faking their own deaths?
Well I hadn’t really thought I’d done that because it all happened the other way round but we always knew we were going to have to do Reichenbach [Falls], and yes indeed I did do the doctor faking his death though by slightly more elaborate means!
The problem is I’m in charge of both shows and the what I cant ever do is not do something in one show because I did it in the other. Ninety-nine per cent of the audience haven’t a clue who I am or know that I work on both of them so you just ignore things like that. They are two swashbuckling geniuses, there’s always going to be doing similar things
I suppose if you couldn’t ever use something that had been in Doctor Who, after fifty years that would be pretty limiting.
Absolutely, god yeah. And you know in the very early days of Doctor Who they actually used Sherlock homes as a base when working out the character. I think it was Sydney Newman who said ‘make the old guy more like Sherlock Holmes’. There is a sort of link between the two. The world is very different, Sherlock is more or less inserted into the real world and is the exceptional inhabitant of it whereas the Doctor is bizarre but is inserted into an even more bizarre world.
Was it strange to write doctor who, having been a fan as a child?
It was but that is becoming a long time ago, because I wrote for Russell [T. Davies]‘s first season. It’s starting to get hard to remember that Doctor Who used to be show I wasn’t involved with as opposed to a couple of words I’m having stapled into the middle of my name. Its really hard to remember I just used to be in the audience, and will be again some day. That’s become odd. But yes, it was. But very exciting, very very exciting.
Back in 2004, when we were approaching that first series and various groups were writing for Russell it felt like, it felt sort of magical and strange that doctor who was coming back, it felt impossible that we were actually doing it and could go to the set and see the police box. It hadn’t been on for 15 years, it was so incredibly exciting! And I remember sitting down for the first time and thinking ‘bloody hell, I’m actually writing doctor who’. That never completely wears off to be honest, I’m always very excited about writing Doctor Who but its now harder for me to recapture the feeling of it being entirely a novelty.
How do you come up with the monsters? Of all the different episodes of Doctor Who it seems to always be yours that have the most terrifying monsters
Gareth Roberts, one of my fellow writers on Doctor Who, had a theory that you write the Doctor Who you remember – he tended to remember the funny ones, so he writes funny Doctor Who and I remember just being terrified of it so I tend to write the scary Doctor Who. Neither memory is more accurate, its all kind of nonsense but I do like the fact, the sort of weird sense of transgression of it being slightly wrong to have a television show whose mission statement is to petrify kids. Try and pitch that and get it made today! ‘We are going to scare the crap out of very young children.’
Do you think you have a thing for not killing characters, or bringing characters back?
I’m not very good at killing people. I don’t like it! I didn’t even know that about myself until Russell pointed out that I’d written six episodes of Doctor Who for him and I hadn’t killed anybody. Literally hadn’t killed anybody. No one dies in The Empty Child, no one dies in Girl in the Fireplace except the person who was dead already. I have killed a few but… I haven’t killed any main characters, I don’t think the doctors companions should die, I think that spoils the fairytale a bit. But that doesn’t mean that I wont of course!
How much are series and story arcs planned out in advance?
We’ve got the shape for Sherlock very clearly because its been done before to say the least, and the arc in this particular series that’s just gone has been very carefully plotted in advance, very carefully. In part because I had to write it in reverse order because we did Scandal last. So you know, the whole ending, how we were going to do it, I mean that was the first thing we were talking about: how did he pull it off, and the idea of Moriarty killing himself and all that stuff, that’s been in place for a very very long time.
But other stuff, Doctor Who had a big arc this year which is unusual for it and we’re going to play with that a little bit, I’m pulling back from that slightly just because, for variety more than anything else, it tends to be a bit ‘Movie of the Week’, Doctor Who.
So will the episodes in the next series be a bit more contained?
Yes but there’ll always be and always are things that run through it, but I suppose it will be slightly less big than it was last year. Last year was the most we’ll ever do, I think. It got a lot of attention and caused a lot of controversy, and it got a much bigger American audience because it kind of gave them a reason to keep watching. But I think we have to keep changing doctor who or else it feels rather stale.
Is it true that the current companions, Amy and Rory, are leaving the series?
That’s right, yeah.
Are they just going to be gone when the next series opens or…?
No no no, I’m writing that right now, the big Rory and Amy heartbreaking finale, they’ll be gone forever, I’m doing that right now.
How heartbreaking?
It will be quite heartbreaking, definitely… I think you’ll be in trouble watching it.
Aw, why can’t there ever be a happy exiting story?
Heartbreaking doesn’t mean unhappy. Wait and see. I mean, it’s parting. It’s parting from someone and that’s always very hard.
When does the new series start?
I don’t know, they’re being incredibly evasive so I actually don’t know so autumn-ish… With Doctor Who the scheduling can change at the last minute, I didn’t even know when Sherlock was until seven days before it went out. We just had our first official day commencing pre-production on Doctor Who so knowing when its actually going to be shown is a little bit optimistic! But we’ll definitely show it, and I’m pretty sure it will be the autumn. Pretty certain.
The Man Who
February 8th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
We are in the golden age of the geek. After decades of being the butt of high school movie jokes – laughing at their interest in games and lack of interest in matching attire – suddenly the geek is king. Games and technology have gone mainstream, and giant glasses and Pokémon references are not the preserve of the socially awkward, but rather the socially pretentious. Our TV heroes have also gone the way of the geek; the tough, gruff “solve the problem with punching” protagonists have made way for the TV genius: someone who unravels the riddle and saves the world with intellectual might. Two of the highest rated shows in the UK feature such geek idols, and the geek behind the geeks is writer Steven Moffat, head writer of Doctor Who and co-creator of Sherlock, the recent TV adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle series.
Doctor Who, for the uninitiated, is a show featuring an “eleven-hundred-and-three-year-old” alien who travels through space and time in a police box (called the TARDIS – Time and Relative Dimension in Space), fighting monsters and finding friends to take along with him, only ninety per cent of which have been very attractive women. Having run from 1963 to 1989, the show had been on a seemingly permanent hiatus until a reboot headed by Russell T. Davis aired in 2005. A fan since childhood, Moffat jumped at the chance to write his childhood hero. “Back in 2004, when we were approaching that first series … it felt sort of magical and strange that Doctor Who was coming back. It felt impossible that we were actually doing it and could go to the set and see the police box. It hadn’t been on for fifteen years; it was so incredibly exciting, and I remember sitting down for the first time and thinking ‘Bloody hell, I’m actually writing Doctor Who’. That never completely wears off, to be honest, I’m always very excited about writing Doctor Who, but it’s now harder for me to recapture the feeling of it being entirely a novelty.
“It’s hard to remember Doctor Who as a show I wasn’t involved with, as opposed to a couple of words I’m having stapled into the middle of my name. It’s really hard to remember I just used to be watching, and will be again someday. That’s become odd. But very exciting, very, very exciting.”
One cliché of Doctor Who, and both a point of ridicule by non-fans and fond nostalgia by those who watched as children, is the cheesy special effects and alien antagonists. The new series has a more impressive budget and use of CGI than the original, but the writers are keen to stick to their memory of the show. Unlike most British series, which have few episodes and a single writer, each episode of the Doctor Who has a different writer, with Moffat writing key episodes and overseeing the story lines. This can lead to very different tones, from humorous to chilling. “Gareth Roberts, one of my fellow writers on Doctor Who, had a theory that you write the Doctor Who you remember.” Moffat explains. “He tended to remember the funny ones, so he writes funny Doctor Who, and I remember just being terrified over it, so I tend to write the scaryDoctor Who. Neither memory is more accurate, it’s all kind of nonsense, but I do like the sort of weird sense of transgression of it being slightly wrong to have a television show whose mission statement is to petrify kids. Try pitching that and getting it made today!”
I haven't closed my eyes in five years
“With Doctor Who, I’m thinking of how I can get people to be scared, I suppose; what’s the monster this week, what’s the adventure, what’s the fastest way we can start the story, how soon can I get Matt Smith [the actor behind the current Doctor] running is probably the focus there.”
“Sherlock is different, because Mark [Gatiss, co-creator of Sherlock] and I sit around wondering which one are we going to do this year, which bits of the original haven’t been touched, and there’s quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes that hasn’t been touched. We’ve had considerable success just by mining the bits people don’t usually do … I mean, we got such credit for having the first time we see Sherlock Holmes he’s flogging a corpse, and people said how amazing and clever we were but the truth is the first time Sherlock Holmes is mentioned in the first Sherlock Holmes story that’s exactly what he’s doing. We just nicked it from the original.”
Though he started his writing career making children’s television shows withPress Gang, a series based around a school newspaper, Steven Moffat has plenty of experience writing things aimed more at the adult market. He followed up the success of Press Gang with Joking Apart and Coupling, sitcoms about divorce, relationships and sex. However, he doesn’t feel there to be much difference in writing for different age groups. “I’ve never even thought about it. I really, really don’t, I don’t have to think about it, which possibly says something about my immaturity!”
“I think Sherlock is really loved by kids as well actually. I’m not absolutely certain that the Doctor Who audience and the Sherlock audience are as different as people might like to imagine. I was alarmed when they moved back the last episode to nine o’clock, because that’s slightly too late for kids to watch it, and, while we don’t make it for them, it’s obviously more adult than Doctor Who, at the same time I’m always careful not to include anything, you know, you can push the envelope a bit, but you don’t make it unwatchable by kids. There’s nothing my kids wouldn’t watch in it.”
Coupling is an exception to this rule. Featuring the classic sitcom lineup of three guys, three girls and a heap of misunderstandings, it is very much of the bawdy side of the genre. “The kids in Press Gang, my show years ago, were far more grown up than the ones in Coupling. It is very much in the adult camp, but compared to my children’s shows, so much more immature.
“I love Coupling, but you’ve got more licence, I suppose, when you’re talking to adults, but if I had my time again, I think I would have made Coupling more mainstream, because there’s a lot of episodes that kids can’t watch. ‘The Man with Two Legs’ was a very funny episode, my son would love it, I’m sure, but it’s just a bit too naughty. With just a little bit more inventiveness and a little bit of cover phrasing you could make that show for a mainstream audience as opposed to a niche audience”
The lines are also often blurred between comedy and drama, a feature of Moffat’s writing being the move between tense, emotional drama and tension-breaking jokes several times within an episode. “I honestly don’t change the approach very much at all; the difference is, when you’re doing a sitcom, you’re actually thinking ‘they’ve got to be laughing on this page and this page and this page’. I don’t think there’s any excuse really, unless you’re making people cry then you should be making them laugh. I wrote comedy before I officially wrote comedy, because Press Gang was always funny.”
The dramatic elements can also increase the humour. Comedy often comes from the subversion of expectation and the breaking of tension, allowing the two sides to play off against each other. “Comedy sits better in a drama, the way its sits in life really, but then successful comedies can come from dramatic elements. The line can be blurred, because comedy is an artificial distinction unless you’re actually talking about a comedian. If you’re talking about narrative comedy then it is just story telling.”
Steven Moffat’s latest hit has been Sherlock, an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels, whose second series recently aired to great acclaim. Sherlock sets itself apart from most adaptations with its setting in modern-day London. The show fully incorporates modern attitudes and technology, which Moffat feels is a natural progression for the original character of Holmes. “We just decided we were going to update him properly; he’d be a modern man because he’s a modern man in the Victorian version, he’s always using newfangled things, like telegrams. He’s someone who appreciates and enjoys technology; he’s a bit of a science boffin, he’s a geek, he would do all those things. I just think it’s fun, I don’t think all the fantastic tech we’ve got limits the storytelling, I think you can use it in all sorts of ways.”
Many people have commented on the similarities between the characters of the Doctor and Sherlock, down to their respective series finales, in which both characters faked their deaths. “We always knew we were going to have to do Reichenbach, and yes, indeed, I did have the Doctor faking his own death – though by slightly more elaborate means! The problem is, I’m in charge of both shows, and what I can’t ever do is not do something in one show because I did it in the other. Ninety-nine per cent of the audience haven’t a clue who I am or know that I work on both of them, so you just ignore things like that. They are two swashbuckling geniuses; they’re always going to be doing similar things.”
So what next for the man with the golden pen? Following the climatic end of ‘The Reichenbach Fall’, the final episode of the latest series of Sherlock, it was revealed to much delight that a third series has been commissioned. There is also a seventh series of Doctor Who currently in production, so it seems there will be no rest for Moffat in the near future. “We just had our official day commencing pre-production on Doctor Who, so as for knowing when it’s actually going to be shown is a little bit optimistic. But we’ll definitely show it, and I’m pretty sure it will be the autumn.”
Details of the upcoming series are vague, but it seems that the Doctor’s companions of the last two series, Amy Pond and Rory Williams, played by Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, will be leaving the show. “I’m writing that right now, the big Rory and Amy heartbreaking finale. It will be quite heartbreaking” Moffat teases, “I think you’ll be in trouble watching it.”
Top Ten: Movie Detectives
February 8th, 2012 § 1 Comment
As the second series of Sherlock finishes on BBC One, Emer Sugrue takes a look at what movies you can use to fill that detective-shaped hole in your heart
10. Sam Spade – The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The original hard-boiled detective, and the Bogartiest of all Humphrey Bogart’s roles. If he was any more hard-boiled he’d be a peppermint humbug
9. Nick Charles – The Thin Man (1934)
It’s half detective film, half slapstick comedy, but all drinking binge. Although Nick and his wife do manage to solve a murder, it’s merely a distraction from all the cocktails.
8. Clarice Starling – The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
FBI academy student Clarice is in a race against time to find a serial killer, so she enlists the help of a serial killer. So outside the box, this film created a new box in which it is firmly placed twenty-one years later. This movie ruined Chianti, fava beans, and the name Clarice.
7. Will Dormer – Insomnia (2002)
This hard-bitten detective travels to Alaska to solve a murder and battle his conscious while suffering insomnia caused by the twenty-four hour sunlight. Jeez Will, just close the curtains.
6. Inspector Thomson and Constable Dexter – Gosford Park (2001)
A better breed of bumbling detective. The comic relief duo in this murder mystery accidentally but systematically destroy most of the evidence at the scene and fail to solve anything.
5. Roger Murtaugh – Lethal Weapon (1987)
This is the archetype of the buddy-cop movie and Roger Murtaugh is too old for this shit. He does it anyway. The movie is twenty-four years old, so think how badass this guy must be now.
4. Eddie Valiant – Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
This dark film noir washed-up alcoholic detective has to prove the innocence of a cartoon rabbit. It is exactly as awesome as you imagine.
3. Inspector Clouseau – The Pink Panther (1963)
A return to the bumbling side of things with Peter Seller’s French police detective. His attempt to foil the theft of the titular Pink Panther diamond ends with him in prison for the crime. The original and the best.
2. Doctor Watson – Sherlock Holmes (2009)
The first film in decades to avoid ‘Stupid Watson’. While Dr. Watson was an intelligent and insightful man in the books, second only to Holmes’ genius deductions, most adaptations skewed him into a bumbling idiot who couldn’t figure out a murder if the victim had written the killer’s name is five-foot letters in blood in Watson’s own kitchen, thus allowing Holmes to provide endless smug extrapolation. The latest reboot restored him to his rightful intelligence.
1. Sherlock Holmes – Sherlock Holmes (2009)
The first true detective, he can figure out your life from the ketchup stain on your tie when everyone else just figures out that you’re sloppy.
Otwo Attempts… Living in the Dark Ages
February 8th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
When Otwo asked me to give up technology for a day, I told them no, and then I posted it on Facebook. However, after much negotiation, tears and eventually prying my iPhone from my still tweeting fingers, I was off on my technology-free adventure.
My instructions were to give up technology but I decided I needed clearer rules that that. What counts as technology? Was I allowed have the lights on? Is the printing press considered too high tech? Inspired by the New Year’s release of cabinet papers, like any good time traveller I settled on a cut off point of thirty years. Were they even that technology-free in 1982? They had televisions, phones and even video games, limited as they were to shooting circles with a triangle. When it comes to practicality though, I was in a much worse situation than my eighties counterpart. People in the eighties had landlines, but I don’t; mobile phones are so ubiquitous that landlords don’t bother to install them anymore. Then again, a student in the 1980s wouldn’t have had a phone either so it’s just as well. Similarly with Ataris, VCRs, walkmans or other eighties technological breakthroughs; while they existed at the time, few people had them and I certainly don’t. I don’t even own a radio. My attempt was also limited by the technology used in my flat – students in Ireland were unlikely to own a fridge but I don’t think my flatmates would have taken kindly to me plugging it out. As for TV, RTÉ existed in 1982 but frankly, I’d rather watch the fridge.
Stripped down to the basics, I began my day. I was quite looking forward to it. How hard could it be? I had lived in the eighties before. Briefly. Once I got over the initial shock of not being able to communicate every inane thought I had the second it occurred to me, I began to miss the truly useful aspects of modern technology. I went for a run but didn’t get far. Normally, I have an app with a voice telling me every few minutes how well I’m doing – just hours without constant electronic reassurance, and my life was falling apart.
I decided to go to town but I couldn’t check the bus timetable. In preparation for my technology-free boredom, I had arranged to meet a friend the day before. One of the major things we’ve lost as a society is the ability to plan. Normally when I’m going to meet a friend, I make a vague arrangement some days before, decide on a time that morning and then shortly before tell them I’m running late, all through text. Back in the day if you made a plan but something had come up in the mean time, there was absolutely no way to let them know. You either had to go anyway, or just leave them waiting. To check the bus times I had to walk to the bus stop and write down the times. On paper. Like a peasant.
I don’t usually wear a wristwatch since I have my twenty-first century pocket watch – a phone – so I misjudged the timing and arrived at the meeting place a bit late. My friend was nowhere to be seen, but I had no way of knowing whether he was also running late or had arrived, waited a few minutes, and then left. I had no choice but to sit down on some convenient steps and wait. And wait. I waited hours, years. Or maybe ten minutes, I didn’t have a watch. I couldn’t contact him, he had a phone but I didn’t have the number except in my phone. Even if I had, I would have absolutely no idea where I would find a payphone, or even how to use one. I’ve had a mobile phone for as long as I’ve had anyone to call. The worst part was I had nothing to do; nothing to play with, nothing to listen to. It was a long time since I’d heard the unadulterated sounds of the outdoors; I nearly always have my iPod on when going anywhere. Even when I’m not listening to music I have my headphones on so charity collectors, homeless people or random weirdos don’t start chatting to me. I was in great danger of becoming the latter that day.
Eventually my friend arrived and noises of the outside world aside, I was able to enjoy a fairly normal day drinking coffee and wandering around the shops. One bit of luck for the day was that I was able to use an ATM – cash machines arrived in Ireland in 1980 so I was saved the ignominy of having to go into the bank and interact with people. I headed home and after satisfying myself that whether past or present, RTÉ is rubbish, I spent the evening reading.
For a normal if slightly duller day, going technology-free wasn’t too bad. If it had been college time it wouldn’t have been possible at all. Back in the eighties we would have had to hand-write everything rather than just our exams, with our keyboard-withered claws. We would have had to go outside to discover new information, possibly even reading it on something that wasn’t backlit. We would have had to keep up with our friends by actually talking to them instead of reading their status updates and contributing “lol”.
Truly, this is a golden age.
Otwo’s guide to Budapest
February 8th, 2012 § 2 Comments
There is a great train that stretches all the way from Hamburg to Budapest and is used by all backpackers. You can hop on and off at any stage with an InterRail pass, or buy a ticket for any part of the journey. Seats are not allocated – as many as possible are sold and if you don’t manage to cram yourself on then you have to wait for the next one. Normally this isn’t a problem, but last August thanks to the Sziget festival, the train was packed. Sziget is one of the largest music festivals in Europe, with nearly 400,000 people attending annually and over a thousand acts performing. It is held in the centre of Budapest on one of the many islands on the river Danube and makes Budapest the city to be in over August, so be sure to get your ticket early to avoid feeling left out.
Apart from the train, Budapest is breathtakingly beautiful. The city is dominated by the Danube, with important buildings to be found on either side of its banks. From the huge central Széchenyi Chain Bridge you can see the baroque Buda Castle, rebuilt in the sixteenth century after the destruction of the original medieval castle, and the neo-gothic Parliament House – the biggest building in Hungary. Everything along the river is lit up at night, making for spectacular scenery. Most of the museums are around this area, and though you have to pay for entry, they offer student deals and discounts for visiting more than one. Even without these the fee amounts to no more than a few Euros. There are also free walking tours several times a day, each showing different aspects of the city.
Budapest is very easy to get around, either by foot or metro. The cost of the metro is reasonable, which is fortunate, because unlike most of the surrounding countries, it is impossible to get on without a valid ticket. There are staff at every entrance and exit checking and stamping tickets and they come down hard on anyone trying to cheat, so be warned. Taxis are expensive because they know only tourists will take them, but your hostel might be able to help you out, both to assist you with the language barrier and to make sure you don’t get ripped off too badly. There are day trips you can do outside the city but if you are only staying a short time then the centre has plenty to offer in a small space, making even the metro unnecessary if your hostel has a central location. Ultimately, Budapest demands a comfortable shoe.
One thing you should not scrimp on is your accommodation. While there are plenty of cheap hostels, many of them are outside the city centre, and the metro does not extend very far. The average quality is not as good as other cities, and at busy times you could easily end up paying over the odds for a dirty, noisy dorm. Along with the beautiful sites there are scary back streets full of boarded-up strip joints so pay attention to the ratings on the booking site.
The food is similar to other Eastern European cities; lots of meat, potato, stews and dumplings, and all delicious. Because it’s such a tourist-reliant city, it’s not as easy to get a cheap meal as other places. Depending on your budget you may have to take a walk away from the castles and museums, but even nice places aren’t outlandish. Two things make it feel more expensive than it is; first, if you have been travelling around a lot and come from somewhere like Slovakia, everything over a Euro seems horrifying. It’s amazing how quickly your expectations can adjust. The second is the currency. Hungary uses the Forint, worth approximately 320 to the euro. Paying over a thousand of anything will give you pause, even if it’s actually a fantastic deal. Even the cafés aimed at tourists are much cheaper than anywhere in Dublin.
Although maybe not as budget-friendly as the rest of Eastern Europe, Budapest has plenty to offer anyone with a love of travel, food or history, and an adventurous spirit.
Woman Paracetamol
January 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Why is this a thing?
Now look, I’ve made my peace with Feminax, it has anti nausea stuff along with very strong painkillers which you can argue has particularly female applications but this is baffling. Woman paracetamol? It has EXACTLY the same ingredients as Panadol Extra. So why did they bother designing and producing special pink Woman paracetamol? So women could accessorize their painkillers? God it’s so annoying when my drugs don’t match my lipstick.
It’s not even more expensive than normal Panadol, nothing about this move makes sense to me.
Serving sizes
January 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Serving size 100g, pot size 125g. I have of course obeyed the packet and flicked the last spoon of yogurt out the window
