In the original 1972 novel by Ira Levin (Random House), The Stepford Wives have been murdered. Such was the heightened state of Artificial Intelligence in Ira Levin’s imagination at the end of The Sixties, that they have been replaced by robots identical in every respect except that they’re compliant. They can’t be described as “sex robots”, to use a modern term, because they’re also “washing-up robots” and “doing-the-housework robots” as well. We could compare Levin’s vision with the current state of robotics – those life-size dolls that will answer simple questions; the various table-top gadgets we can tell what to do – and that would be amusing.
​     But I’m thinking about something else. The same is true – the women are dead; the men seem to be okay with robot wives – in the 1975 film. But then came successive made-for-TV versions (I’m relying heavily on Wikipedia here, but it’s an interesting trail to follow) in which (1980) the wives were hypnotised, broke free, took revenge; (1987) wives and children were victims but husbands (“conspirators”, says Wikipedia) ended up being killed; (1996) the title was changed to The Stepford Husbands, which says what needs to be said. In that last one, the making-into-robots/hypnotising was led by a woman, and the wives*, I imagine, didn’t do much clearing up around the house. No, I haven’t seen it.
​     I didn’t know any of that (thanks, Wikipedia). I did read the book and then see the original film, years back, and then I saw the 2004 film (do I have to insert “made-for-cinema” here?) directed by Frank Oz and starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler and Glenn Close, among others. With that cast, perhaps it’s not surprising that the wives weren’t murdered and replaced with mindless automata**. They’re capable of being rescued. Yes, one of them is shown to be a robot (spoiler) or a machine or a something by a husband who uses her as a cashpoint (her mouth dispenses banknotes), but even she is capable of being restored to, er, full working order.
​     After The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin wrote The Boys From Brazil (1976, Random House), which gives us an interesting take on cloning technology. In 2011, in a Guardian review, Sophie Martelli wrote, “What scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering: in the 1970s, although scientifically possible, [the villain’s] plan belonged firmly in the realm of fiction; now it's not nearly so far-fetched.” I’ve always liked the idea that cultural change can be tracked through popular entertainment***; maybe Ira Levin’s unusual prescience also extended to the impacts of science. If you're thinking of indulging in a little light cloning over the weekend, read The Boys From Brazil first.
​     Yes, I know I haven’t mentioned Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin’s second novel (first published on 12th March 1967 by Random House). In a discussion of Ira Levin’s curious prescience, perhaps that baby is just a little problematic. She (he?) would lately have celebrated her fifty-first birthday. Or thereabouts. Not that I’m in any way mentioning politics in this post, and I’m not in any way thinking of the plots of The Omen (1976) and its sequels (yes, there was a remake), but, you know, isn’t fifty-ish a good age to be thinking about running for office?
*I’m assuming they did agree to marriage, as the title suggests.
**Is that too finicky? I mean “automatons”.
***For example, the idea that all those black-and-white movies of the fifties about alien invasion expressed fear of communism.
​To complete the record, Ira Levin's first novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1953, Simon & Schuster), told the story of a wife-killing serial murderer. Spoiler - he ends up boiled, which a cinema buff might consider a blow for bunnies everywhere.

There’s a saying. “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” And a definition. “Engaged in futile or ineffectual actions.” Apparently, it’s humorous. Thank you, Collins Dictionary. Dot com. I was thinking about that saying earlier, and it struck me that if you were the deck-chair attendant on the Titanic, in the ship’s last hours, you’d probably want some comfortingly familiar activity to take your mind off things. And then it struck me that badly placed deck chairs might be an obstacle to an orderly evacuation. You’d be needed.
​     But if we come at the saying from a slightly different angle, we might get: continuing to engage in activities that are long past their sell-by date. Those deckchairs would need to be out of the way, and you wouldn’t want to throw them over the side for fear of hitting a lifeboat, so you would perhaps secure them as per regulations for adverse conditions. But then going around collecting drinks orders, or advising that the late-night deck-quoits competition is scheduled to begin in five minutes, would be inappropriate.
​     Enough with the Titanic. People died. There was a deckchair attendant, at least one, and at some point he realised that there wasn’t a place on a lifeboat for him. What I’m saying here is – we’re often mistaken about usefulness. To go somewhere else and pick a different example, it’s not exactly “futile or ineffectual” to have the soldiers (visibly) guarding Buckingham Palace dressed in conspicuous red jackets, nor indeed for the travelling on important state occasions to involve gold-coloured, horse-drawn vehicles*. All of that may be past its sell-by date (the real guarding is done by [redacted]; a black cab would get you there quicker), but it does bring in tourist dollars (yen, etc.) and it draws the eye.
​     Soldiers in red jackets are useful. But not for their original purpose. It’s disconcerting (but not surprising) to research the subject online, and find that red jackets remained part of the British Army’s standard going-into-battle uniform until shortly before the First World War. See for example Stanley Baker, Michael Caine et al in the film Zulu (1964)**. The idea of the red jacket was for the enemy to see the British Army coming and be frightened off the battlefield (or not). Let’s have some emphasis here, please: once that red jacket was written into the regulations, not even (for example), the increasing accuracy of snipers’ rifles through the nineteenth century could dislodge it.
​     Happily for those young officers leading the charges up out of the trenches and into the barbed wire, and for the men following them (who were shot if they didn’t go), by then the red dye for the jackets had become too expensive for widespread use***. We can conclude that a century ago, cost-cutting worked better than leadership in saving us from a rule-bound adherence to sending men into battle dressed as targets. And it occurs to me to say: maybe just about anything works better than leadership – or is that going too far? I think of the community response to the Grenfell Tower fire, against the official government response, and the way that every clever government reorganisation of services ends up with fewer services.
​     You can’t even cost-cut effectively if your biggest state secret is that you’ve mismanaged everything to the point of having no money. But this is me going off on a tangent again. Somewhere back there, I was on target to make the point that usefulness is all about what works, in financing public services, evacuating ships, bringing in tourist dollars (yen, etc.), and not about official roles, official uniforms, what the rulebook says. I should clarify that this is not a post about those organisations of today that employ battalions of lawyers and PR executives to tell us how useful they are; that tell us “lessons have been learned” every time they hurt people; that respond to requests for an apology by telling us how sorry they are that we’re upset.
​     It’s not about them. But – “engage in futile or ineffectual actions”? And – “engage in activities that are long past their sell-by date”? Hm. Let’s hear it for the deckchair attendants. And the locals. Like I said, often we’re mistaken about usefulness. And effectiveness. And sometimes we’re not.
*Although I remember the so-called “minor royals” turning up in grey minibuses for the most recent royal wedding. Why do reporters call them that?
** “By 2007, critics were divided over whether the film should be seen as deeply anti-imperialist or as racist,” says Wikipedia. Also, same source, the battle at Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers (2002)  was filmed with Zulu in mind.
***“Nonsense! That red jacket will frighten the snipers away, man. Off you go.” I think I remember reading somewhere that a sniper could always spot an officer because he’d be the one holding a handgun and not a rifle. Officers were to be killed first, of course, to cut off the flow of orders.

With social media and marketing, I think it’s important to maintain the illusion. I get regular emails from total strangers addressing me as “Dear William” (and occasionally as “Dear FNAME), and I feel I should write back in the same affectionate way. My mobile-phone provider always expresses such excitement in its texts about competitions – there are “hundreds of prizes to be won” in the current one, apparently – that I feel guilty for never texting back and offering them the chance to win one of my old mobile handsets.
​     Omitting company names to protect the innocent (sic), I had this through the post the other day – the old-fashioned post, I know, but still. It’s a slip of paper bearing the message: “We are pleased to share with you the exciting news that the takeover of [one company name] by [another company name] has succeeded and our new brand name is [a third company name].” I’ve kept it. Occasionally I take it out and imagine the pleasure, the excitement, the wild celebrations – the parties, the dancing on desks, the instantly regretted spontaneous hugs and kisses – and I think about writing them an impassioned letter – through the post, of course; green ink, scented paper, the works – to tell them how much the news that [one company name] has changed into [a third company name] has changed my life for the better.
​     I get over it quickly enough (although I'm tempted to go ahead and write anyway). The second single-sentence paragraph on the slip tells me what the company does. There’s something marvellously zeitgeist about sharing all that excitement and then feeling the need to explain who they are and what they do. And something even more zeitgeist about an explanation that leaves me none the wiser. This company is “a market-leader in the delivery of technology-enabled solutions”. Unlike all its rivals, who are backward-looking providers of spare parts for stagecoaches, of course.
​     I remember the opposites test - may even have invented it. I used to apply it, still do, and once I even wrote about it in a book (Can I Quote You On That? Harriman House, 2006). The test is: could this person (or company) say the opposite and still make sense? If not, they can safely be ignored. A doctor telling you that she cares for her patients can be ignored, because she couldn’t say the opposite. But a doctor saying that she treats everything with a short course of tablets is telling you something worth knowing – if you believe in talking cures, for example, or the restorative power of fresh air and cold baths, or homeopathy, you might want to go elsewhere.
​     The opposites test can be applied to politics, although the results are almost always disappointing, and might be a useful tool for generating follow-up interview questions, for interviewers prepared to go off-script and chance it. A variant is to replace "men" with "women" and vice-versa in any text about who's equal to whom, et cetera. We only achieve true equality when the two versions make equal sense. 
​     But the new thing is the right-relation (not) between statement and emotion. We don’t really believe, do we, that the staff at [one company name] were quite so gripped with enthusiasm when management got them together and told them they were now working for [a third company name]? We know, don’t we, and they know, that the next exciting conversation will be about achieving efficiencies? And we know what that word means. Same applies to every announcement these days: are you really that thrilled? If not, why are you bothering to pretend?
​     All that excitement is the house style of the connected economy, and at best it’s meaningless. At worst - if the emotion doesn’t fit the statement, and both fail the opposites test, well, that’s an exciting opportunity to engage proactively with the challenges that the future presents to us as individuals, isn’t it? We appreciate your contribution over the years, and wish you every success in whatever you choose to do next. Here's a box for your personal items. Goodbye.​

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but there’s a scene in the film Terminator 2 – Judgement Day (1991) in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing the Good Terminator, has to explain the workings of the Bad Terminator (played by Robert Patrick) to the young John Connor (played by Edward Furlong). If you missed the film, Arnold has been sent back through time by the older John Connor to protect the young John Connor from the Bad Terminator, which has been sent back…
​     You see, the older John Connor is successfully leading The War Against The Machines*, which began when Skynet became self-aware (in, er, August 1997) and realised that people were trying to turn it off. Skynet’s losing the war (so much for AI – ha!) but it does have a time machine so it can kill the hero while he’s still young. This isn’t Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot short-story collection (Gnome Press, 1950) because Skynet is concerned for its own wellbeing. Self-interest rather than protecting people from themselves – how times change.
​     Bad T, as we might as well call him, is an advanced prototype, made of liquid metal**, a T-1000 to Our Arnold’s T-101. Bad T can take the shape of anything he (it) touches. Young John’s question is, why can’t it become a bomb and get him by exploding? Reasonable question, and there is a case (although this isn’t one of them) for films that end with the hero(ine) being wiped out at an early stage*** to give us all a bit of a rest while we watch the bad guy take over the world and then have to start fielding complaints from neighbours about, I don’t know, the latest economic data and Brexit.
​     Sorry. All this explanation has slowed down the blog post. Where was I? Oh yes. That question. You’re making an action sci-fi movie, and sooner or later, your audience is going to wonder why Bad T doesn’t just get close to John Connor and explode. So you write the question into the script before the audience gets to it. But then you have to answer it in a way that doesn’t slow down the action…
​     …and all of a sudden it’s time to halt the narrative again with another laborious explanation from me. I read a lot of fiction on Kindle, independent small-press and self-published fiction. I like writing that’s published that way, because it’s subject to natural selection: you’re either good enough to find an audience, or you’re not. And why shouldn’t you go direct to an audience for that judgement? And yes, it is standard practice to offer the first 10% of a book as a free sample before buying. But, oh, the explanations. Oh, the number of sub-Chandler detectives who are visited out of hours by an alluring would-be client with sex appeal and a secret … detectives who then take us through a laboriously explained, clumsily scene-setting reminiscence of who they are and why their world is as it is.
​     Oh, the action heroes who have only to pick up a gun to remember the chapter-long entirety of their military careers and weapons training; oh, the fantasy heroines who have only to get up in the morning and find they're out of coffee to remember the entire history of, say, witchcraft as it works in their world. If I was running a creative-writing course, I’d say: trust the audience! With the exclamation mark. Let the characters know what they know, let them show it through their actions rather than bore us with a back-story dump at the outset, and let’s just trust the audience – I would say “readers”, but the ebook trade seems to prefer “fans” – to pick up or supply the rest.
​     So my point is – have I explained this enough? – give the audience something, even just an acknowledgement of the issue (not an evasion), and they’ll do the rest. They don’t want the narrative to stop any more than you do. And now back to the blog post.
     John Connor asks his question. And what could happen is: the entire film could grind to a halt while Arnold Schwarzenegger explains the imaginary but necessary science behind shape-shifting terminators made of “mimetic poly-alloy” (brilliant). Without that explanation, we might wonder. But this is a big-budget Terminator movie. These people don’t stop for anything, and nor do their terminators. Arnold’s reply is a masterclass in how to handle any kind of explanation or background that might slow things down.
     Why doesn’t the T-1000 get up close and explode? The reply starts with a couple of sentences about complex machines with moving parts, et cetera. Maybe a second or two of screen time. Then…
     Then Mr Schwarzenegger gives us the all-important explanation. Everything we could possibly need to know about the T-1000’s limitations in one sentence.
     “It doesn’t work that way,” he says.
     And that, people who write the books I read before going to sleep, is how you do it. Please.
*Another war against the machines. See also the Butlerian Jihad, covered here.
**Another blob! Scroll down for last week's blob coverage. Just occurred to me that the thing in The Thing was a blob too. They're all over the place.
***If you haven’t seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), see it now.

Maybe I should start by saying that I caught the last ten minutes of The Blob last night, the 1958 film starring Steve McQueen. Interesting how old the young people looked, and how frequently the not-quite-so-young authority figures kept dismissing them as young. A plot device, I suppose, and it was a film of course, but I don't associate "young" with men and women that old. The leading actress, Aneta Corsaut, playing Steve's girlfriend, had to be carried out of several of her scenes, literally, helped out of the rest, and I couldn't quite get my head round the relationship between the two of them. The term "submissive" has fifty shades of meaning that I don't intend here, but Steve was definitely in charge.
​     That was his first starring role! Didn't realise. The film is a "cult classic" and was released as half of a double bill with I Married a Monster from Outer Space. In The Blob, Steve McQueen ​"plays a typical oversexed, car-lovin' highschooler who can't get anyone to believe his story", says the internet. Oh, wow. Compare and contrast Steve and Aneta with, say John Travolta and Nancy Allen in the original Carrie (1976; the one with Sissy Spacek). Depictions of oversexed, car-lovin' highschoolers changed a lot in that eighteen-year period, and I'd say that Nancy Allen's character was certainly dominant in that relationship.
​     I did want to say something about the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, released on Friday 9th March, showing that manufacturing is up while construction is down, but given last week's observation that my "unique visitors" prefer film talk to boring stuff about Brexit, et cetera, maybe I should say first that there was a remake of The Blob in 1988, and the title is listed as "in development" on IMdb. Expect more blobs. Such a divergence in  relatively long-term economic data - no, don't go! I saw Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri last night. Dixon's character arc was interesting, and no wonder Sam Rockwell won an Oscar for it - just quickly, if you don't mind, such a divergence is yet more evidence that the world is changing....
​     ...well, I find it interesting. In one window of my local cinema is a b/w (grey, geddit?) poster bearing the injunction "Don't Miss The Climax" and in the next window is a colourful poster depicting a group of garden gnomes. Front and centre is, I do believe, Sherlock Gnomes. And yes, I have just looked that up, and it is a film. Clever old me. As for the other one - you know, it's just occurred to me, out of nowhere, that back around the time of the original The Blob, the term "women's picture" meant something completely different from what it might mean today...
​     ...so I've looked up "women's picture", scrolled down the search results, and on second thoughts, given current sensitivities** and realising that I'm completely out of my depth here, maybe I will finish by insisting on saying that a dramatic divergence of economic data might as well be welcomed as a sign that the world is changing. We don't need to - probably shouldn't, although so often it's the automatic response - defend the status quo in manufacturing or indeed in construction. Or membership of international trade bodies like the European - but you're right. Enough already.
     The Blob - spoiler - ended with the blob itself being flown off to the arctic, where the cold would render it inert. Pity they didn't take it to Antarctica, where it would have really helped Kurt Russell in The Thing (1982), which was another remake of a (1951) cult classic - but I could go on all day, and there'll be more economic data next week. Don't want to use up too many film references all at once.
​*The  1951 film The Thing from Another World became John Carpenter's The Thing of 1982, and then Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s The Thing of 2011. All of them were based on John W Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There? which was first published in the August 1938 edition of Astounding Stories - at around the time Campbell was appointed editor, oddly enough. Campbell was successful in the role, Wikipedia tells me, and remained editor until his death in 1971. Note: the magazine went through several titles; I've abbreviated one.
​**Posters up outside our little cinema this morning include Tomb Raider, with Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, and Mary Magdalene ("Her Story Will Be Told"), which I found described online just now as the "Rooney Mara Jesus Movie". We are so very much of our time, aren't we? If we're speaking in movie titles - Analyse That!***
​***Since you ask, 2002 sequel to 1999's Analyse This.

Let's invent modular cars. Little one-seater roadworthy vehicles, I do mean cars and not bikes, that clip together when two - or more - friends want to share a journey. Electric, I imagine, with onboard AI to handle the docking with another modular car. For riding on intelligent roads, I imagine; roads made out of sensors and waste plastic trawled from the ocean.
​     You sit in your car, which is a cross between a mobility scooter, a Smart car or equivalent, and one of those ancient Heinkel three-wheeler one-person cars (click here to see one - the front opens, in case you're wondering), and if somebody else wants to come with you, the decision is: which side to put his car? Then, let's say, his front wheel on that side and your back wheel on that side retract as the cars dock with each other. Then you roll back your window, he does the same, then you're both front-seat drivers while the AI and the GPS do the actual work. Maybe the convention is that only one of two docked cars is powered to drive - the one on the right, say, shuts down for the journey.
​     Any more friends (family) - bolt them on behind. Give it time, and augmented reality - AR? Is that right? - can do the road signs. The sensors in the road talk to the AI whenever there's a junction coming up, and our little cars route us round any potential traffic jams. If we take some kind of Nudge* approach to speed limits and distance, all slowing down together and gradually adjusting our ideas of how far is too far, maybe we'll all end up so local that we talk to our neighbours as easily we do the staff at the reception desk today.
​*Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Yale, 2008. "Nudge Theory" advocates changing behaviour via interventions that are "easy and cheap to avoid". Example: put the junk food on a high shelf and the fruit at eye level. For speed and road safety - I think of those tiny shrines of flowers, cards and photographs that flash past occasionally on the verge, and also of those roadside signs showing the black silhouette of a motorcyclist, with a number beneath.
​     We would have to "harness the power of technology" to do this, of course, reducing our intelligence to the level of the computers we were applying to the project, but that would be okay because we could also go back to using "Space Age technology", in the sense that these cars would dock in the way that Command Modules docked with Lunar Modules - Columbia docked with Eagle on the Apollo 11 mission, for example.

More harm has been done to the world by people who think that they know what's best for the future, than by people who worry that they aren't up to the job. Discuss. I think I'm becoming an enemy of certainty. The world's unpredictable. No, you can't be sure that's how it's going to turn out. Stop pontificating. Learn humility. "Nobody knows anything," said William Goldman (Adventures in the Screen Trade, Warner Books, 1983), who did at least know that much.
​     And more, actually. It's a good book. Token television reference: I came across a Freeview channel the other night, on which they were making a great deal of fuss over the news that Lost in Space was going from black and white into colour. Pretty sure I was there when that happened first time round. I struggle to describe my feelings at this evidence of how far we've come in all those years.

Some weeks, I'm just fresh out of opinions. I like the idea of sitting down here and writing this, but nothing much has happened (that I've noticed) and my interior monologue has failed to turn up any worthwhile (no, I'll be the judge of that, thank you) insights into anything. No reflections on superhero movies, no more thoughts on last week's brief snow - nothing to distract from this still-life morning with its ice-flat shiny sea reflecting dark clouds one way and blue sky the other, with the sun kind of cramped in under the clouds and - hey, look! - Stena Line ferry easing itself slowly towards the dry dock.
​     Went to Sainsbury's last night, in Truro, and there was no milk. Gaps on the shelves. Went to Tesco at the weekend, in Falmouth, and there was very little of anything. Deliveries not back to normal after two whole days of snow, I suppose*. The usual news sources tell me that we're facing water shortages due to burst pipes and floods due to melting snow. Engineers are "working through the night" to restore power to homes cut off by, er, whatever it is about snow that kills electricity. Engineers work through the night in the way that political leaders reach agreement after all-night talks, treaties are only ever signed at the last moment** and winning athletes couldn't have done it without the support of the crowd. All part of the myth we live by.
​     Back to those engineers. The snow lasted two days. Two whole gruelling days. Imagine the state of the country if it had lasted through the weekend. [There is absolutely no way I can work in a reference to the film 30 Days of Night (2007) here, is there? No? Good film, anyway. Watch the extras.]
​     Not to get too apocalyptic on a peaceful morning with the sun now decisively shining, but is this really how the unexpected hits us? I think it's fair to say that country-wide snow really is unexpected in the UK. Every time. The weather here is famously unpredictable, and yes, it was sunny just before the snow, and again on the afternoon after Day Two Of The National Crisis. That was when I sat out in the sunshine on Prince of Wales Pier and thought: nobody in those countries that get snow predictably and handle it sensibly would believe this - that it's all vanished overnight. They can laugh at us, but how would they handle not knowing what the next day will bring?
​     Yes - genuinely unexpected. And because it's unpredictable and never hangs around, there's no point in spending money on being prepared for it. Which suggests to me that country-wide snow in the UK gives us a good indication of how something truly unpredictable would hit any equivalent*** nation. Not snow, necessarily, but anything unexpected (like, say, a strike of fuel-tanker drivers - another British first). Supermarket shelves empty after two days, engineers losing sleep, talks continuing through the night to find a solution. Given the fragility of our socio-economic whatchamacallit, structures, civilisation, arrangements for keeping everything going, you really don't need zombies to stage an apocalypse these days. Just a glitch in the supply chain.
​     The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the title of a 1797-1798 etching by Francisco Goya. It's satirical, according to something I read, and apparently a self-portrait; Goya had interesting dreams. The Slow News Day of Reason is the title of a 2018 blog post by William Essex, and it seems to have taken us from a nothing-happening sunny morning to a zombie-free apocalypse in five, now six, paragraphs. Maybe on my next trip to a supermarket I'll get a really big trolley and work myself up to some panic buying.
​     We're all doomed. Again.
​     I feel much better now, thank you.
​* "Just-in-time (JIT) is an inventory strategy companies employ to increase efficiency and decrease waste by receiving goods only as they are needed in the production process, thereby reducing inventory costs. This method requires producers to forecast demand accurately." So says Investopedia. I remember JIT coming in. Books were written. There were gurus. Nobody mentioned snow.
​** Although the fashion these days is to sign them after the last moment - the US government actually does shut down before a budget deal is reached, for example.
​*** I nearly put "civilised". Then I thought about "western", but got hung up on W or w. Then I thought: what I'm trying to say is "equivalent". So I put "equivalent".
​And finally ... not that I got distracted or anything, but I find that the antique question "Do you want to come up and see my etchings?" has been superseded by the invitation to "watch Netflix, and chill". Okay. I have noticed recently that people talk about what they've seen on Netflix in the way that they used to talk about what they'd seen on TV. But I don't think "Do you want to come up and watch my television?" ever took off. "Come up" implies apartment-dwelling, above the ground floor. Above the art-supplies shop, perhaps. [This is probably my moment to mention Bloodhound Gang's 1999 single Bad Touch. Everybody was watching X Files back then, chilled or not.] 

I've noticed something about this weekly blog. Finally. After all this time. Whenever I decide that what the world needs now is a further dose of what I think about Brexit, Trump, the NHS or politics generally - whenever I decide that and write accordingly, the number of "unique visitors" to the site goes down dramatically. Ordinary visitors stay away as well, I guess, although there isn't a count for them*. But when I say something about a film, or box set, or other screen-based entertainment, my unique visitors all come back again. Dramatically, yes, because they're like that - or that's how I visualise them.
​     How do they know? Is it the title? No - wait. Before I say anything else: I am in the middle of bingeing on the two-season box set of Afterlife (2005/2006; I mean the one starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln), which was axed apparently because Britain's Got Talent was getting more viewers (thanks, Digital Spy). I'm one disc (two episodes) away from the end, and when I finish, I'm thinking of tracking down the first season of Medium (2005/2011, starring Patricia Arquette and Jake Weber), which ran all the way to its natural conclusion without being cancelled.
​     Thinking of watching Medium for the comparison: the two series started in the same year and tackled roughly the same subject. One's a US drama; the other's British. I like Andrew Lincoln's character's houseboat, but I think I'd want to live in the Medium house - but not the neighbourhood (predictable weather). Perhaps the house could be transferred, flat by flat, prop by prop, to the UK? Like that bridge was taken from London to a US desert, is that right? Anyway - maybe I could get a few paragraphs out of the comparison. Fictional ghosts in the US behave a lot better than their UK counterparts.
​     Oh, and yeah. I was saying something about unique visitors. Websites and how people somehow instinctively know to stay away from a post about Brexit. Something about that. But more importantly, I have been watching television. Promise. Came home last night, flicked it on to see Michael Douglas say, "I'm the bad guy?" (Falling Down, 1993, Robert Duvall's in it too), flicked over to Newsnight - no, wait. Don't go. Gladiator (2000) was on, and a thing in which a group of remarkably attractive young Americans were tracking down a murderer**. That lasted me through till bedtime. No news at all. Promise. No, really.
     Okay - I'll go to the cinema again.
​*Of course I know what unique visitors are. Sort of. I'm trying to be funny.
​**Medium was on, too. They all looked a little older, so no doubt it was a later series than I remember, but doesn't it strike you as odd, sometimes, this peculiar immortality of TV characters? With their clunky old mobiles and black-and-white complexions? Long time since I first saw Jonathan Harris arguing with Billy Mumy on that distant planet, and even Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) (1969) are still bickering.