FlashForward appears a fairly decent but unremarkable programme in terms of its plot and characters, but it attempts to deliver a very potent message. It’s not anything subliminal or intricately woven, indeed, it staggers up to your face and belches its words across your cheek with a healthy splattering of spittle. All the tact of a drunken fool, you might say.

The Demon Drink - the cause of lots and lots of bad things in FlashForward

The central character is Mark Benford, a recovering alcoholic. From the word go, FlashForward makes it clear that Mark is on borrowed time. His wife will leave him if he relapses, and his AA group provide constant reminders of the cliff edge he teeters along. Mark himself lives a life of denial and fear after seeing a flash of a future in which he is drinking again – or, to use the programme’s wonderfully prohibitionist parlance, “taking a drink”.

Now, I realise America has long used television to project the image of drinking as something done largely by hopeless Irishmen in dingy late-night bars, but FlashForward ups the ante with the bluntness of its demonisation. And it is part of an ongoing campaign to cast drinking in a negative light, one which appears in the face of failure to be taking a scattergun approach across television.

House is more of a drug user but his occasional fits of drinking nearly ubiquitously end in him laid in a pool of vomit on his floor. Throughout the series, the pattern is reinforced that he drinks and makes everyone’s lives worse, while Cameron sits at home with a glass of wine after work and everything is fine. It’s a more subtle approach than FlashForward but after a couple of series it’s still pretty clear what the message is.

A more interesting case is Mad Men, another American programme which I’ve watched from the beginning and after three series still cannot conjure up one decent reason why it exists. When all comes to pass and we go up to the pearly gates for reckoning, the Mad Men Series 1-13 box set will be bouncing along in front of me and when St. Peter asks him (and it will be a him, for Mad Men is a show for men) what he’s done with his life, he’ll just shrug and go, “well, I…” and fade off into a very soulless, insubstantial yet somehow eerie 42 minute monologue about advertising and sex.

Mad Men - better known as smug cocks with brandy

The programme portrays a 1960s American view of drinking, naturally contrasting to much of what’s shown today. It’s a world of men drinking spirits in the office, cocktails over dinner and coming home to pull a beer out of the fridge. Drinking is a very routine part of life, very rarely shown to any form of excess. The over-arching impression I get is that they show drinking as something the characters do to ease their own inadequacies; whenever a tragedy or troubling moment occurs, the man reaches for the bottle while his wife falls by the wayside and tries to comfort him. It’s quite a sad picture, quite bleak, and quite off-putting – the message is, “you don’t want to be like these men”.

The antithesis to this recent phenomenon of anti-beer fascism might be Cheers. At times it’s saying exactly the same thing – too much drinking is bad for you – but it’s altogether a much gentler message. The lead character is a reformed alcoholic (well, by American standards) and it’s occasionally mentioned that he no longer drinks, but it’s only ever in passing. The bar fly at the end opens most episodes with a one-two: “Hey Norm, what do you say to a beer?”, “Hello *drinks* goodbye.” This lightheartedness is occasionally contrasted with moments when Norm takes things too far, moments which show genuine weakness in a man who likes to portray himself as easy-going; in comparison with the cudgel used by FlashForward, this way of showing how drinking can have negative effects is leagues ahead.

As ever, a history lesson would likely offer a few answers to the “drinking question”. Prohibition and demonisation do not work long term. People will still have an appetite to drink and will find ways to either circumvent legislation or filter out messages they disagree with. As sad as I find it to see pubs closing at the moment, I can’t worry about the long term because history shows that as one thing dies, something new emerges to take its place; I don’t know what that will be yet, and I’m sure when I’m an old man I’ll sit whistfully telling tales of the great public house of my youth, but it’ll be sat in whatever kind of place takes over as the social drinking place of the age.

I respect attempts to curb dangerous drinking as that is a social problem that it is justified to interfere with; as always, the moral I follow being that anyone can do whatever they like with themselves so long as it doesn’t fuck with me. But ham-fisted attempts to demonise all kinds of drinking do no-one any favours. They are unrealistic and simplistic attempts to challenge a “problem” that exists as much in perception as reality; it is a passed-on and accepted wisdom that society has a drink problem to be challenged, and successive generations attempt to apply the same old “fixes”.

I feel that all I can do is add my voice to the list of people who hope that cheap drink in supermarkets and corner shops is consigned to history, beer prices are lowered in pubs and we see something of a return to the pubs of the not-too-distant past – social drinking places where the demons are drowned out by laughter.

Beers · FlashForward · House · legislation · Mad Men · prohibition · TV

For the last few years I’ve been inspired by beer writers in the way that inspiration works for me, in that I’ll think an idea is brilliant for a short while until I find something even more brilliant to become enthused about. I thus go from year to year with only vague over-arching senses of what it is I’m actually interested in spending my time doing, under which hang ever-changing ideas that have gripped me at that moment.

I suspect this type of person is roughly equal in number to the type of person whose interests give them a label – a hiker, a traveller, a womaniser – with the minority left over being that small group of people who under the greatest examination and scrutiny appear to have no discernible interests, activities or pastimes whatsoever beyond having their following day’s work lunch prepared to a strict evening timetable.

Beer writers have been inspiring me in the last few years to visit Germany. The best I’d managed until this week was a New Year trip to Cologne in 2007/08, which for all intents and purposes could have been a trip to anywhere with a collection of Irish theme bars. And so we come to December 2009 and a festive-themed trip with Phoenix Holidays to the German Christmas markets.

It’s almost a matter of pride to me to have holidays organised and information to hand plenty of time in advance, so the chaos in which this trip eventually fell into being was a first for me. I didn’t actually know where we were going until 15 hours prior to leaving. I wasn’t sure of the means of transport or when we’d get home. It wasn’t far off being the world’s crappest red letter day gift – four days in the unknown at indeterminate times.

Because of all this, the beer side of the trip fell into total neglect. I’d started out with vague hopes of landing next to an uber-brewery where buxom frauleins with pigtails merrily mixed their malt and hops as soft flakes of Alpine snow landed on their cheeks. In reality I spent 22 hours on a coach of pensionable grannies and got ein grosse bier from a stern-faced cellar-dwelling beast.

We stayed at Hotel Bach, one of what seemed like two hotels in the whole place. Now I sometimes think I have a problem because my tolerance for shit in hotels and restaurants is spectacularly high, and it’s not some faux English reserve or wanting to be polite. Unless I’m about to be poisoned by the food or contract pneumonia from the broken window, there’s not much they can do to really bother me. Have a read of those TripAdvisor reviews and you’ll see a whole menagerie of whinging arsebags, some of whom were on our trip and I discovered in real life are those people with physical incapabilities of not commenting on everything that crosses their line of sight, be it positive (rarely) or negative (overwhelmingly). If you’ve found this place because you’re wondering what Hotel Bach is like, well, take the words of my mum: it wouldn’t have been out of place the last time she visited. In the 70s. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, though, it just looks like the backing set on a Turkish pop video.

The only thing that puts a dampener on a hotel for me is if it’s got a really stinkingly piss-poor bar. A hotel bar is ultra-important in a group holiday because it’s the one obvious focal point where even my spacially-challenged dad couldn’t fail to make his way to. It’s a convenient place to meet while the ladies are finishing their hair, it’s somewhere you can grab a quick bit of food without disrupting the whole night, it’s the place you’ll doggedly insist will still be open when you’ve finally started making your way home at 3am.

Fortunately the bar at Hotel Bach isn’t too bad. The cliched bad German pop they play for the coachloads of English is tremendous, and two or three TVs sit on the walls showing Bundesliga games. Smoke lingers in the air and clings to your clothes – for the first few moments, a very strange sensation as memories from years gone by flood back. The panelling on the walls looks like a 70s Danish porn set. And while the bar is small, the lady behind there speaks good English and is pleasant.

So, what of  the beer? Well my beer experiences extended as far as “whatever beer each bar had” and by the last night when I felt as if another lager would make my head fizz open unexpectedly, “jagermeister and coke”. The latter is almost entirely to blame for the hellish journey home the next day, leaving at 8am and not arriving back at 7am the next day – 23 hours. Word to the wise – stick to two light ales the night before travelling, or you’ll feel a right daft toss.

For anyone wanting to know what Phoenix Holidays are like, well, it’s a case of you get what you pay for. All your transport and accomodation is included so once you’ve paid – just £99 each in our case for three nights – there isn’t much to worry about. The tour guides and drivers, Peter and John (where was Bjorn?), were great blokes, John in particular with his series of increasingly dire clubland jokes tagged alongside bleak, dry northern humour. On the downside, well, you’re basically on a coach for the best part of a day there and a day back so in effect you get two full days to do things. Koblenz is included on one of the coach trips but we went back the next day to look round more, and ended up finding a great rock bar.

Ultimately, this was once again nothing like the German beer trip I’m still hoping for. I do like German beers and pubs – they have a character very distinct to our own. The lesson I should learn though is that travelling to random spots of the country and hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of the full-on German beer experience just isn’t going to work. Perhaps next year I’ll find a spare week of holidays, book a flight and finally find my fraulein in the brewery.

Bad Salzig · Beers · Boppard · Germany · holidays · Hotel Bach · Koblenz · Phoenix Holidays

Picture the scene:

It’s the early 1990s and you are either William Broyles, Jr. or Al Reinert, both respected screenwriters.  You’ve just been asked to adapt the book ‘Lost Moon’ by Commander Jim Lovell.  You’re going to tell the incredible true story of Apollo 13- possibly the greatest rescue of the 20th Century.  Tom Hanks is going to star in it.  Ron Howard’s going to direct it.  Imagine and Universal are going to fling money at it.  Ed Harris has signed up.  As has Gary Sinise.  And Kevin Bacon.  And Bill Paxton.

To be frank, this thing’s going to get so many awards it’ll end up shitting golden statues.

Then the marketing guy turns up.  And he’s got a problem.  The trailer.

You see in the real events of April 1970 this is what mostly happened:

Nothing.

There was a relatively small explosion which left the men stranded over 200,000 miles from home but all they could do was slingshot round the moon and hurtle back to Earth through a dark empty void with nothing much to do but hope.  In reality, the world held it’s breath and the talent involved in the film would easily make a great human drama out of it but all you’re essentially writing is the story of 3 men in a box.  And all the marketing man wants to know is what the hell are we going to put in the trailer?

Especially since everyone knows the ending anyway.

So you, Broyles or Reinert, have to manufacture some action where previously there was none.  So you write an entirely fictional scene into this true story in which there’s a much bigger explosion and Tom Hanks is pumped into the vaccuum of space and killed.  It’s thrilling, noisy, exciting and entirely made up so it’ll probably mess up the narrative to have it in there.

So you get Tom Hanks to dream it instead.

I hate dream sequences. Mostly, they’ve been excuses to shoehorn in some manufactured excitement or intrigue without ruining the story- as in Apollo 13 above or, most infamously, the whole of Series 8 of Dallas.  This opened up a whole world of madness to a variety of shows over the years- the Saved By The Bell gang memorably morphed into worldwide rock sesnsations ‘The Zak Attack’, while an episode of Darkwing Duck saw the lead character enter his own dreams to fight a witch that he had become erotically infatuated with.  Remember, Darkwing Duck was a childrens’ cartoon- but filtered through the evil machinations of a writer allowed to let it all hang out with a dream sequence it suddenly became a terrifying mixture of A Nightmare on Elm Street and invasive brain surgery.

That was then though and times have changed.  The dream sequence has morphed these days to focus on the waking dream in which hallucinations regularly pop up to guide a protagonist through the plot that week because everyone’s clearly far too tired of contriving circumstances to explain actions and think it’s all better if someone’s imaginary friend does it instead.  Most TV shows these days aren’t complete without at least one maverick genius who is constantly plagued by someone in their head who magically appears at useful intervals to highlight important information and provide a distraction which, oddly, no-one in the real world ever seems to notice them suffering from.  Dr. Baltar from Battlestar Galactica spends half of his time imagining himself being dry-humped by a tall, blonde Cylon but no one ever seems to call him on the fact that he keeps phasing out of conversations with a far away look on his face and his flies undone.

After Girls Aloud, Sarah Harding's moved into ventriloquism proved less successful

I know this is all a nice allegorical way to demonstrate the internal monologue of brilliant minds but it’s simply left me terrified of clever people.  Dr House is another fine example- a man who seems utterly incapable of solving a medical mystery until a hallucination appears to tell him what dosage to increase and that it’s probably just a combination of wind and nostril cancer.

And now James Cameron has spent $400 million or something producing Avatar which is essentially a 180 minute dream sequence in 3D- clearly technology is at such a point that film-makers can do anything and so what they ought to be doing is, if they instist on having dreams and hallucinations in films and on TV, doing them properly.

My big problem with the dream sequences in the likes of Apollo 13 and the imaginary friends in House and BSG is that they’re too realistic, too normal, too much like the waking world of their subject and too obviously relevant to their current circumstances which dreams never, ever are.  Cameron at least appears to have tried to go a step further into the twilight world of the mind’s eye (and Darkwing Duck really had a pop at it) but why can’t dreams sequences now be more like actual dreams?  To get potential producers starting here, fresh from my subconscious, are a few ideas for dream sequences to be merrily slotted into anything that they see fit.

-  British heptahletes Denise Lewis, Kelly Sotherton and Jessica Ennis compete to find out who is the superior athlete with a race around the world in 1768.  They can travel by boat or catterpillar and are accompanied by the colour purple.  The eventual winner is Linford Christie stood on his head in a time of 4 seconds.

-  I get chased around a maze by a shoal of camels.  The maze is made of Tuesdays.

-  All cars are replaced by big, giant eggs that can fly, travel through time and move diagonally like bishops.  They are invented by comedian Tim Vine who becomes the richest man in the Universe and spends his money researching honey.

-  Everything becomes smaller and more pointy

-  The people making a film of your life eject you into space so there’s something for the trailer.

Anyway, goodnight. Sweet dreams…

Apollo 13 · Battlestar Galactica · Darkwing Duck · Dreams · House

It’s fair to say that there’s far too much cack in the World; an endless cycle of reality television, celebrity magazines, gimmicky chefs, hollow blockbusters and The ONE Show all turning this planet into an pirouetting orb of mediocrity but there’s a much, much bigger problem with culture right now.  There’s far, far, far too much brilliance in it.

Let’s take TV, for example.  Back in the 70′s, tens of millions of people would crowd round their televisions of a Saturday night, with hundreds of trillions more joining them at Christmas, to watch Morecambe and Wise.  They were a genuine national institution and watching them was the single most communal act in British society; right up until local Labour councils all passed that law in 1996 demanding that pub jukeboxes played Wonderwall at half 11 on a Friday.  Nowadays though, TV’s changed and a show can be a major comedy hit with only 4-5 million viewers. This decline from the figures Eric and Ernie used to get is regularly held up as an example of how standards have slipped, usually be correspondents to Points of View.

This is, of course, utter conkers.  The only reason thousands of squillions of people would sit together and watch Morecambe and Wise was simply because there was absolutely nothing else on that was any good back then.  Television was a box filled wall-to-wall with cheap, nasty awfulness which was only briefly alleviated by the very occasional flash of quality courtesy of comedians like the aforementioned duo or Dave Allen; or masterful documentaries like ‘The Ascent of Man’ or ‘The World at War’.

Nowadays, however, we live in a multi-channel world which, while obviously allowing much more room for shite, also means we are being inundated with hour upon hour, series upon series of absolute televisual wonder and magic.  America leads the way in this- primarily because their TV industry has more money than the Vatican and roomfuls of brilliant writers- but Britain’s doing it’s bit too- even the previously untapped Sweden is helping out with a superb series based on the ‘Wallander’ detective novels.

The upshot of all this is that there’s no way to actually catch everything you may want to watch on TV in a given week at the time it’s actually broadcast- certainly not if you want to have such things as friends or sleep in your life. Luckily, however, we have the treasure trove wonder of DVD boxsets to help us out.  Except, of course, they don’t help at all.  They merely allow us to postpone when we make the commitment to sit down and trawl our way through a series or two- something for which it’s increasingly difficult to find the time as shows are now being made with the boxset in mind so that episodes demand to be watched in bursts of 4 or 5; or an entire series should be consumed over a bank holiday rather than an hour a week as broadcast.  To this day, and I’ve watched through the series twice, I don’t know how anyone could have watched The Wire at the rate it was originally shown on the telly and kept up with all the labyrinthene plots and intertwining characters.  Not without the help of a lengthy Powerpoint presentation and reference guide before each new episode.

The upshot of all this is that I hardly ever watch shows on TV anymore and instead wait for at least 2 seasons of DVDs to be available so I don’t have to wait 7 days between episodes and I can keep up with what’s happening.  This means that I currently have a massive backlog of great television which I know I may never get round to watching because there simply isn’t time unless I take a couple of months of work or contract a degenerative illness.  I’m working through Battlestar Galactica at the moment, then it’s going to be Deadwood but I also want to take a 3rd pass at The Wire and it’s nearly time for my annual splurge on the first 4 Sorkin-penned seasons of The West Wing.  I’ve never seen an episode of 24 or Lost either and I’d like to but they’re at over 5 seasons each so where the hell am I going to find the time to do that?  Oh, and I need to catch up with Heroes as well.  And watch The Sopranos again.  And Six Feet Under By which time there’ll probably be enough Flashforward for me to start on that.

I’ve just flung some maths at the previous paragraph and it turns out that to do all that- giving each episode an hour to allow for toilet breaks and food an such- would take practically a solid month of TV watching; morning, noon and night.  Impossible, basically.  I’ve always had a slightly melancholic feeling whenever I’ve realised there’s a whole massive planet out there and I’ll most likely never get to experience all the great places it has to offer but that’s nothing compared to the helpless misery of discovering I’ll never be able to do everything I want to that involved nothing more than sitting on my couch and staring at a box.

And so I demand an embargo on brilliance, a ban on talent, a cull of wonder.  Everyone needs the chance to take a breather and catch up on all the fantastic stuff that’s been produced in recent years and then we can all start on new things again.  So, not only should good television be stopped for a while, but also there should be no new comics in order to allow relative newbies like me to catch up with their hideously complex mythologies (“No- that’s Superman’s uncle, Roy- he was killed by Braniac but resurrected using purple kryptonite in 1987 but that cause Lois Lane to lose a leg and Jimmy Olsen to turn into Superman’s uncle, Roy- he was killed by Braniac etc, etc…”) and all talented musicians need silencing for a year so I can continue to work through the hidden gems of late 1960′s psychedelia and soul without failing to notice anything good that’s turned up since the Millennium.  Shut down the films studios too, hide their cameras if necessary.  There’s been some some brilliant in recent years by all accounts but I’ve seen hardly any of them cause I’m too busy not watching TV shows on DVD for any films to even get a look in.

I reckon about 2 years should do it.  24 months for me to catch up on everything and then I can start again.

If I can be bothered, that is.

Brilliance · Film · procrastination · TV

The pump clip for Turkey's Delight by Smiles Brewery

There’s nothing like a spot of bestiality to warm the winter cockles and put a weary drinker in the mood for Christmas.

Now, you may have thought that the comic potential of shoving your hand up a turkey’s arse had been exhausted by the time the Carry On team were busily crafting an entire genre around flying items of clothing, but Smiles Brewery don’t want to give up the ghost just yet.

Witness, friends, the sheer enthusiasm of both the fister and the fistee on this ale’s clip. Is stuffing a turkey such a fun pastime? Is stuffing a live turkey even better? Do turkeys really grin in anticipation of the fun ahead?

If you’re anything like me, the peculiarities of this clip won’t have even registered while you were ordering, which does prompt me to wonder what it takes for a clip to stand out if a spot of jolly animal fisting doesn’t do the trick. Even the terrible pun in the name passed me by at first, and as Paul Bailey said last month is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Another of these curiosities is that Smiles as a brewery no longer really exists. Being a new name to me, I did a little poking around and found that originally hailing from Bristol, it ceased to be in the middle part of this decade. According to ascorbic on everything2.com, who claims to have been involved with those high up in the brewery:

“Over New Year 2004/2005, Smiles Brewery went into liquidation. The pubs were transferred to a new company (Smiles Pubs Ltd.) and the brewery was closed. The rights to brew Smiles beers were sold to the Highgate Brewery. The results have not been good, with the beers showing little resemblance to the Smiles beers of old.”

If the beer list on that page is anything to go by, I would have guessed that today’s Turkey’s Delight may well be a rebadged Golden or Glorious 12th, both of which share the same 3.8% ABV. But it seems to have been a seasonal beer since at least 2006, which would tie in with brewing moving to Highgate a year earlier. Perhaps those who remember Smiles’ beers in Bristol before it closed down may be able to illuminate this question.

Despite only forming in 1978, Smiles became quite a big player in the Bristol brewing scene and according to this excellent history on Flickr, by the early 90s it was brewing 8,000 barrels a year with a staff of 115. Of its early outlets, it seems only The Ship in Lower Park Row is a survivor, this including its most popular venture, The Brewery Tap, shown below courtesy of Quaffale.

The Brewery Tap - Smiles Brewery, Bristol

Sadly not long after this, Smiles began to suffer in the face of competition from other real ale brewers in the area. By 2004, Smiles in Bristol existed in name only and is now brewed over 100 miles away in Walsall. Its future still cannot be said to be certain as Highgate Brewery itself recently went into administration, possibly threatening its contract brews. The Brewery Tap itself was, it seems, virtually destroyed by a “renovation” in 2006 – a sad and familiar sight to many drinkers, as seen below in a photo from Bristol Pubs.

Colston Yard - formerly of Smiles Brewery, Bristol

Richard Brookes, the local CAMRA chairman at the time, sums up the frustration in a way we’ll all understand:

“The pub’s absolutely gutted, the bar is smashed, there’s rubble on the floor,” he told the Post. “You are not talking about a minor renovation here.”

The concensus, which I must touch with a bargepole since I suspect a heavy case of “beer nostalgia” may be at play here, is that the beer is no longer what it used to be. Whether that’s the case or not, I’m sure it’s something different at the very least. Turkey’s Delight has an odd citrus smell, bordering on the manufactured aroma of a bottled juice drink like Kia-Ora or a Netto-brand washing-up liquid. The initial taste is nothing like that though, indeed I had a flashback to my grandma trying to force-feed a caramel chocolate bar down my throat during some Christmas long gone by. The lingering impression is of a very normal beer with a curious smell, and I suspect Wetherspoons have chosen it as one of their Christmas beers precisely because it leans towards the mainstream rather than the darker winter ales you might expect.

It is funny how a half of bitter in the Postal Order in Blackburn can lead you on a walk into the past of a forgotten Bristol brewery.

Beers · Bristol · Highgate Brewery · Postal Order · real ale · Smiles brewery · Turkey's Delight · Walsall