Out on the Wiley, Windy Moors...

Before I embark on the following I should probably declare an interest or two. Firstly, I do have a favourite Bronte sister, and it isn’t Emily. In much the same way as George Harrison was my favourite Beatle, I always felt that Anne, an eloquent feminist ahead of her time, was the sister with probably the most profound contribution to make, and a mass of undervalued talent with which to make it, and who often goes sadly neglected in the shadow of her more crowd-pleasing big sisters. Secondly, I should admit that I’m actually not all that keen on Wuthering Heights which I always felt, though this sounds something of an oxymoron, managed against all odds to combine the eyebrow-raising, dramatic improbability of a Mills and Boon novel with the tedium of Jane Austen (sorry, Austen fans.) At the same time, though, the Yorkshire-bred, English graduate geek inside me was still intrigued by the hype of yet anothe Bronte adaptation, and eager to see if it worked.

Given my introduction above, perhaps it did, being every bit as tedious, far-fetched and unrelentingly bleak as the original. As far as the tedium is concerned, I was actually rather pleased that Andrea Arnold decided to sacrifice loyalty to the original and call it a day soon after Cathy’s untimely death, rather than several chapters and a few more births and deaths later, as Emily did. In terms of the story, then, it’s something of a disappointment if you’re a literary purist: aside from only including half the plot, it doesn’t actually include the character of Lockwood, which means it doesn’t include the ghost, which means, ultimately, it isn’t a ghost story, just a miserable and depressing one. It also does little to explore Heathcliff’s character. I assume this is a deliberate attempt to make him enigmatic, as he is in the book, but it doesn’t work: he comes across as resentful, hateful, and ultimately a bit of a fruitcake.

The main “character” in the film, according to some of the reviews, is the "landscape". This immediately put me off a bit, having endured endless lectures about “pathetic fallacy” throughout school and university – the Disneyfication of the landscape, where it is inevitably dark and stormy at key moments of drama, only for the sunshine to come out after the goodies win the day. Except that in Wuthering Heights, of course, the goodies never win, and consequently you’re treated to two hours of windswept desolation filmed at funny angles in bad light, Arnold presumably being one of those directors who thinks that constant semi-darkness somehow makes it all a bit more arty, whereas in fact it just means you can’t really make out what’s going on. I’m not trying to claim that Yorkshire is generally basking in a warm glow of sunbeams – I don’t think I’ve ever been to Haworth when it wasn’t drizzling – but a bit of seasonal let-up would’ve been nice. It’s implied that Cathy and Heathcliff, admittedly odd though they are, bonded over the awesomeness of their surroundings, and it makes sense that they would have thus bonded in a variety of weathers.
Yorkshire, looking characteristically gloomy. Pathetic fallacy, that.

Arnold takes other liberties, too. Most notably, she makes Heathcliff black. Much has been made of this, which is wholly plausible, and as far as I’m concerned really doesn’t matter much as the point is that Heathcliff is somehow "other", though the book seems to imply he is Asian or Middle Eastern (it’s claimed that his mother could have been an Indian Princess). It does however allow Arnold to chuck in some gratuitously racist terms which aren’t in the book, possibly for shock value more than anything else, accompanied as they are by several “fucks” and even the occasional “cunt”. Again, this isn’t implausible – both are good, old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon words and probably as common then as they still are on the football terraces of West Yorkshire – but whether it’s entirely necessary is a matter of opinion. While we’re on language, though, I was satisfied by the Yorkshire accents and (nerd alert) some of the language structure: devotees of Emily Bronte will note she writes in (to a reader often incomprehensibly phonetically-spelt) dialect with a pronounced West Yorkshire inflection, yet you’d be both amazed and amused by the clipped BBC radio announcer voices of the early adaptations, whose speakers have clearly never been any further north than Watford.

So, was there anything else I liked? Well, frankly, no, but as I’ve said that could partly be down to personal taste. For me the only moment of light relief came after a particularly jaw-dropping few moments of necrophilia, where Heathcliff breaks into Cathy’s room after she has apparently pined herself to death, and appears to have sex with her corpse. The lady in the seat next to me, who’d looked pretty unimpressed for the previous 90 minutes and had already expressed dismay a few minutes earlier when Heathcliff rather over-graphically hanged a puppy from a gatepost, turned to her companion in horror and exclaimed, perhaps louder than she intended: “That wasn’t in the book!”

Indeed it wasn’t. She left then and there, and a gruelling 30 minutes later so did everyone else, possibly toying with the idea of going to the screen next door to watch “We Need to Talk About Kevin” for a bit of light relief. I in turn went home and listened to Kate Bush, whose version of Wuthering Heights is about as accurate as the film while being mercifully briefer, and whose dancing and astounding vocal range are far more chilling than anything a backdrop of Yorkshire moorland could ever offer.

And finally, if you got to the end of this clunky review, here is your reward: (about a minute in) Monty Python's "Wuthering Heights in Semaphore"

My Retrotastic Other Life

I’ve fallen in love. In the space of an hour, confined in bed with my laptop and a mug of Lemsip, I’ve fallen head over heels in love for this website, and with it for an engaging geek and his informed yet pithy game reviews, written in a delightfully colloquial style (“Pretty weird game, this. Can anyone explain this to me?” “I think this one is smashing, and has lots of great puzzles.”) I’ve called him Paul, and his strengths are enough for me to forgive his persistent use of an apostrophe in “80’s”. Endearingly shy without being too socially awkward, intelligent without being arrogant, gently witty and on the admirable rather than the creepy side of geeky, Paul is from some much-maligned town – from Rotherham, maybe, or Preston – and is bashfully proud of his impressive video game-based oeuvre without being obsessive. Nowadays he probably dabbles in a world of Wiis and DSes without feeling he’s sold out, but his passion still lies on the retro side of things. We day trip over to Bradford in the Micra with “Best of the 80s" playing on the stereo and spend far too long in the Media Museum’s games exhibition before proper fish and chips and then, on the back seat overlooking Baildon Moor...Oops, sorry, got a bit carried away there.
National Media Museum, Bradford

I know deep down that he probably isn’t Paul at all, but more likely a collective of single, embittered, midlife-crisissing civil servants from Purley with hygiene issues who spend their evenings and weekends clad in sweaty, unwashed global hypercolour t-shirts ,eating ready meals directly from the carton and tetchily deriding one another’s opinions on the relative merits of the various Repton sequels with “The First Cut is the Deepest” playing on repeat in the background.

I was more than a little obsessed with BBC computer games as a child. My mum was a teacher and used to “borrow” a computer and a stash of games every holiday in the hope that I would then leave her alone for the duration, which I invariably did. I must have spent literally weeks of my childhood hunched in front of those computers doggedly perfecting my Chuckie Egg score whilst everyone else did sensible things, like shopping. Hours and hours spent staring fixedly at implausible birds climbing improbable ladders probably explains my now-poor eyesight. Over time I perfected routes through the various platform-based games, learned which direction all the unlikely causes of death went so I could go the other way (games being more predictable and limited in those days that they are now.) Before I even got to secondary school I could effortlessly breeze my way to level 8 on Chuckie Egg and smash the high score of anyone foolish enough to challenge me on any of the many takes on Space Invaders, though I never did find those Flowers of Crystal. Looking back, it probably amounted to an addiction. Then, at the age of ten and a full year after some of my wealthier, trendier contemporaries, I eventually got a Game Boy, and this fickle, disloyal child traded Dare Devil Denis for Balloon Kid. Where the wart on the end of a witch’s nose in Granny’s Garden once epitomised for me the height of cutting-edge graphics, I now wanted walking mushrooms and jumping fish corpses (huh?!) I can still complete Super Mario Land and still have eighteen lives to spare, and of this I am (I think justifiably) proud.

Recently though someone sent me a web version of Chuckie Egg, and, to my dismay, I can’t even get past level 6. Once so adept at arrow key-based manoeuvres, I now find myself giving up and making a cup of tea after a mere hour or so. You can get Repton on the same site, and I can only marvel at the patience I must have had as a child to doggedly play such a grindingly irritating game, with its gratingly chirpy Scott Joplin soundtrack and its smug-looking lead character which is to all intents and purposes some sort of upright reptile in a jump-suit. As for Flowers of Crystal, I don’t believe it even had an end, and you certainly wouldn’t get away with a game that involved typing “yes” and “no” to a series of inane questions (“Would you like to use a spell?”) nowadays.

But Paul, as ever, is a little more balanced on these matters. So here are a few of the games I used to play, along with Paul’s descriptions (*sigh*).

Arcadians: “One of my favourite games, it is really just a Galaxians clone, but it is especially well done. It has two minor gripes, the ship is a bit out of proportion to the invaders, and they tend to get you into a corner all the time. Cool things include the neat explosion sequence.” (The ship is out of proportion? Wow. That's proper analysis for you.)

BMX on the Moon: “The original game of riding along in a moon buggy, dodgin the ships overhead, shooting them, and jumping over craters on the moon. You have to be very two minded in this game, I suppose if you were good at rubbing your tummy whilst patting your head then you would be good at this! It has a nice sound when you shoot the aliens, sort of a coughing sound!”

Chuckie Egg: “The ORIGINAL platform game on the Beeb. This was a great game, I hope you have it in your collection! The aim was simple, collect the eggs and bird seed, whilst dodging the ostriches! Also, you had to negotiate gaps, holes, ladders and lifts (very awkward to use). If you got far enough, I seem to remember the ostriches being replaced by a giant bird which roamed around the screen. A true classic.” (Your memory serves you correctly, Paul. Level 9 goes back to level one, except with a giant bird that seems to be magnetically attracted to you. I wonder what they were taking when they designed it?)

Firebug: Paul says: “A really original game, this one puts you in the character of a Fireman, putting out little fires on the different platforms, whilst dodging the baddies. Highly original gameplay and great for a quick burst everyday. One of my favourites, although I can't seem to find it anymore!” (Quick! Someone find it for me now! I’ll send it to Paul, win his heart and we will drive off into the sunset in his Micra in a sort of 80s version of a fairytale...)

Repton: “Probably THE most famous game ever done by Superior, it was the Super Mario of the BBC world, this is an all-time classic. You play the part of Repton, the humanised reptile, with a zest for life, and probably (by now) one hell of a diamond collection. The idea is simple, collect all the diamonds, avoiding the rocks, and dodging the evil monsters which hatch from eggs. One of my all-time favourites.” (Ahhh, Paul, you and I will have to just differ on this one.)

Wallaby: “I think this is a cute little game, you are in control of mummy wallaby, whose baby has just been kidnapped by monkeys. You have to go through the level, punching all the monkeys (somehow the wallaby is a boxer!) and collecting the fruit, climbing ladders and trees. It is great fun, and the boxing part is great, it is a little repetitive though.”

It really is a fabulous website. Do look at it, and pine for those days when not only did we have floppy discs, but they were genuinely floppy. Meanwhile, it’s been so long since I went in the Wii Fit that I think it thinks my Mii has died.

Ee it's Yorkshire Day!

Well apparently today is Yorkshire Day! And to celebrate, and since I've not posted in over a month, I thought I'd share this link Along the lines of "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue"'s final round, these are Yorkshire-themed films. So, in the same vein as the Cows, here are some choice suggestions from Twitter, with some added extras courtesy of my dad and fellow Facebookers:

Forrest E'by Gump
Close Encounters of the Thirsk Kind
Gangs of York
Some Like it Otley
Truly, Madly, Keighley
Apocalypse Now Then
War o' T' Worlds
The Wold Is Not Enough
Goole Intentions
The Fred Trueman Show
Ferret Bueller's Day Off
The Whippet Man
Fry Lard With a Vengeance
For Your Pies Only
The Pie Who Loved Me
Pies Wide Shut
Sleepless In Settle
Letter to Bresnan
Hullboy (1, 2 and 3!)
Hellifield And High Water
War of the Wolds
About a Boycott
Hebden Bridge on the River Kwai
Withernsea And I
Gosford Parkin

Right. Your turn.

Bradford Calling

In what will probably come as something of a relief to readers of this blog, yesterday's match against the giants that are Burton Albion was postponed - something to do with it being a bit cold - and so I shan’t be moaning about yet another disappointing yet predictable defeat, futilely defensive playing and the fact that we have a perfectly good player on loan from Hull who we persist on playing for ten minute stints only, making me wonder quite what the point of him is.

No, I won’t be writing about that. If by chance you’re interested in my deep thoughts on the subject, carefully withheld from the public until such eminent commentators as Michael Wood had said them first, thus legitimizing them (I’m a girly girl, you see, and as such incapable of forming such opinions by myself) then you can check out the Boy From Brazil website. Here you will find a throwaway remark suggesting that Burton Albion fans who’d rocked up to Bradford expecting to see a thrashing only to find themselves wandering around at a loose end should visit the brilliant National Media Museum to pass the time.

Ahhhh the National Media Museum. Yes. I agree wholeheartedly that this is indeed a place everyone should visit. In my day, of course, it didn’t have so grand a title, being known as the somewhat less catchy “National Museum of Photography, Film and Television”. This was an absolute goldmine of a place for small children at a time when the most exciting thing that could possibly happen to you was to open a packet of crisps to find a piece of paper telling you you’d won another packet of crisps. In particular, they had one state-of-the-art exhibit where you got to pretend you were a newsreader. You sat in a small booth on a non-adjustable chair, so if you were below about 5 feet tall, i.e. if you were a child, all you could see on the playback was your head poking over the top of a large desk. There was an introduction with a sombre voiceover by, I think, Michael Burke, then you had to read an autocue. The choice of news story was, on reflection, perhaps not perfect for the hoards of youngsters who had a go, being a report on the famine in Ethiopia, accompanied by graphic images of dying children. When I went back 15 years later in an attempt to persuade my southern boyfriend that there was more to my city than mushy peas and racial violence (the likes of Wikipedia don’t help when they list Peter Sutcliffe among their “notable Bradfordians” but forget about the likes of Adrian Edmonson and Delius) they were still using the same news story, and around half the other interactive exhibits were out of order.

But what else is there to do in Bradford? Well, lots, apparently. We’ve come a long way since we ran for Capital of Culture in 2003, setting up a “Bradford Embassy” in Trafalgar Square which consisted of free Bombay Mix and posters of Gareth Gates and a bloke handing out leaflets to the handful of people who turned up reminding them that we were quite good at rugby. There’s so much to do in Bradford, in fact, that Visit Bradford has confidently produced a page entitled “50 things to do in Bradford”. Now, OK, quite a lot of these are not actually in Bradford. Many are, predictably, connected to the Bronte sites in Haworth and several basically suggest “leave Bradford and explore the countryside around it which is all pretty and that”. Others are positively clutching at straws: apparently we have a Museum of Reed Organs and Harmoniums, unbelievably the only one if its kind in the UK, and elsewhere in the list they suggest you might want to visit a cemetery or simply eat a curry. But even when you discard those they’ve still come up with a good 30 or so attractions, and they’ve not even mentioned the ice rink, or the fact we have no less than 3 branches of Greggs in Kirkgate alone.
So as Monty Python might say, apart from the National Media Museum, famous serial killers and harmoniums, what has Bradford got to offer us? Well, in case you’re popping up there any time soon, here’s my list of things to see:


1. Saltaire. I could write pages and pages on Saltaire. It’s possibly my favourite place in the UK. Briefly, it was built by a wealthy businessman to house his mill workers in the 19th century, and it’s now a UNESCO world heritage site. The mill itself has been converted into a gallery featuring works of art by David Hockney, with the upper floors selling, somewhat bizarrely, vintage designer furniture. Nice scones in the cafe, too. As for the area itself, the houses are gorgeous, and Roberts Park is lovely. And it has its own brewery. How many places can say all of that?
2. They’re probably right about the curry, but I’m not sure I’d go with their choices. You might want to try the Three Singhs, simply because it has an awesome name (and, incidentally, they used to sponsor Dean Windass). Alternatively head to Omar’s Balti House on Great Horton Road, famous for selling naan breads large enough for the whole of your party to share. I took my husband there once and he commented on how few cats you see on the street in that area, but don’t let that put you off.
3. The National Museum, as I said above. I’m told they’ve mended the buttons on the interactive exhibits so sometimes they actually work now. If you do go, let me know what news story they use these days.
4. Have a mosey round Buttershaw. I promise that, contrary to popular opinion, you’re unlikely to be propositioned by a crack whore if you head over there. It’s all famous now, being where Andrea Dunbar lived and as such being recently used in The Arbor and, maybe more famously, in Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The Guardian even claims we beat LA in some respects these days, and who am I to argue with the Guardian? And who needs Hollywood anyway?
5. Get proper fish and chips. They can’t do them down south. Mother Hubbard’s, a Saturday treat when we couldn’t be arsed to cook and where you got a nice cup of tea with your jumbo haddock, has sadly gone, but there are plenty of other places. You might want to follow this up with a proper pint - Bradford's full of real ale pubs with sensible (i.e. not London) prices.
6. Bradford University’s Peace Museum. Whilst my own institution has a museum full of misshapen human body parts pickled in jars, Bradford has a museum optimistically dedicated to Peace. Awww. Incidentally, their Peace Studies department plays our War Studies Department every year for the Tolstoy cup, annually kicking our war-mongering ass.
7. Keep your eyes open for misspellings and mistakes on signs. Only in Bradford can you get a carpet shop called “Alladins’s Cave” and a corner shop that claims to be “Open 7 days a week. Closed Fridays.”
8. The Bronte Birth Place. OK, so you can visit the all-singing, all-dancing Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, but few people realise the Brontes were actually born in Thornton in Bradford. When I was a kid this building housed an underwhelming tearoom, but now they've jumped on the commercial bandwagon and for a small fee they actually let you in to look at reconstuctions of what it might have looked like in the old days, sort of like a pre-Victorian version of the pretend rooms at MFI.
9. Architecture. Carefully hidden amongst the Brutalist monstrosities of the city centre there’s some amazing Victorian architecture, from the Town Hall to Listers Mill, from Cartwright Hall to the Wool Exchange (which now houses a branch of Waterstones), from the Midland Hotel to the fabulous Alhambra Theatre and of course the Cathedral.
10. Valley Parade. Home of Bradford City. Of course. I’m sorry, but it had to be done.

So there you are. In this age of austerity, I hope I might have persuaded you to consider West Yorkshire for your summer getaway this year.