Nerd Do Well (16 page)

Unfortunately, Lucas seemed to forget this when creating his prequels, gleefully including sly winks to decidedly Earthly concepts, such as the evils of smoking cigarettes and smart-mouthed sports commentators. The computer-generated, dramatically weightless robot armies of the trade federation constantly use the phrase ‘roger, roger’ as an affirmation, which is old-fashioned US Air Force speak, taken from the Able Baker phonetic alphabet. Couldn’t he think of something more otherworldly? All that money was spent trying to create a galaxy far, far away and the risible dialogue keeps bringing us down to Earth with a bump. Even Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds had their own call signs in S.I.G. and F.A.B. and I never cared a jot that I could see their strings.

This was just one of the multitude of niggles that hampered my determination to enjoy
The Phantom Menace
in 1999, having flown to New York especially to see it. I dimly recall the British playwright Howard Barker speaking of the supreme discomfort we experience when embarrassed by the people we respect. This was most certainly the case at the
AMC
Lowes cinema on 34th Street as the demolition of my childhood obsession unfolded before my eyes. I should have noticed the signs as I pretended to like the needless augmentations of the original films when they were re-released as ‘special editions’ in 1997.

If I’m totally honest, I should have accepted that things were going awry when I pretended not to hear Chewbacca yelling like Tarzan as he and a couple of space bears swung from a vine on a mission to hijack an electric chicken in
Return of the Jedi
. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and back in 1977, way before I required glasses, my jaw slackened in anticipation of the film everyone was talking about and the curious legend proclaiming a distant time and location faded on to the screen. I was hooked even before the three neat paragraphs of expositional text receded into infinity, setting up the first dizzying scene.

The opening sequence of
Star Wars
must surely be one of the most effective in the history of modern cinema. John Williams’s iconic march settles into a dreamy reflection of the spacescape. A single moon hangs in the starry, silent depths of space over a sandy-coloured planet. The score sweeps and gathers into urgency as a large ship passes overhead, establishing a brief standard for the size of interplanetary cruisers, but as the music swells to percussive insistence another ship rumbles into view, profoundly dwarfing the first. Its mammoth hulk widens into a seemingly never-ending triangle of awesome military might as it fires red energy bolts at the hapless, now tiny, blockade runner, which in response sends back an ineffectual volley of soft green laser blasts.

There is a wonderful economy of storytelling, which grips the audience from the outset, even before we meet any of the characters. It is entirely a bonus that the visuals are so extraordinary and this is key to the success of this first film. If the context were removed, an appealing and easy-to-follow story would still exist. Lucas then superimposes a rich and complex fantasy environment over this story, enabling us to experience classic tropes in a new context. We have seen the relationships and even the situations before in other films (Lucas himself once referred to
Star Wars
as his ‘
Searchers
in space’). But the roles usually divided up among ethnic supporting actors in war films and westerns are allocated to genuinely alien characters and robots. He adopts a narrative device used by Akira Kurosawa in his 1958 film
The Hidden Fortress
to present the story from the point of view of the lowliest of characters. This is a clever means of easing us into the environment at the first social level, allowing us to look up to the protagonist Luke Skywalker, even at his lowliest phase as a whiny farmhand and before the classic narrative device of ‘the call to action’ which elevates him to hero status.

In Kurosawa’s film, these characters are two peasants called Tahei and Matakishi who befriend the protagonist, General Rokurota Makabe. In
Star Wars
, the job goes to C-3PO and R2-D2, a couple of affected robots whose actions facilitate the entire plot. We certainly hadn’t seen this before. Hal 9000 was a bit camp but he was most likely bi, particularly when compared to C-3PO, a bot who wouldn’t look twice at an artificial girl, even Daryl Hannah in
Blade Runner
or that chick out of
Metropolis
with the metal tits.

Interestingly, there was a photo spread in my secret copy of
Lovebirds
that featured an erotic model displaying her wares in a science-fiction setting while wearing silver boots and futuristic make-up. In the little blurb that accompanied the series of pictures (a sort of humanising personal message from the model no doubt written by the magazine’s male editor), she spoke of not being able to sit down due to ‘the rogering [she] got from C-3PO last week’. Even as a child I felt this was profoundly wrong. Not just because C-3PO was clearly incapable of ‘rogering’ anybody, but because he wouldn’t, even if he could. He wasn’t interested in such things, he was too busy being fluent in over six million forms of communication and being posh like Jeremy Thorpe.

Extra-Curricular Activity

‘F
p.

or the love of God, let me act!’ I felt like screaming, amid the shocking dearth of extra-curricular drama in Gloucester and the surfeit of opportunity to chase cheese wheels down a hill.

Luckily, my drama teacher at school noticed my frustration and suggested that I join the Gloucester Youth Theatre as an outlet for my dramatic urges. The teachers’ strike was ongoing at the time and our educators had ceased supervising extracurricular activities as part of their industrial action.

This meant that the usual plays and inter-house drama competitions were cancelled in the name of financial justice, and all my performance energy was expended being disruptive in class. Dora Brooking, a wonderful drama teacher beloved by the students for possessing a maternal energy that soothed even the thugs, decided I needed something more than school plays to satisfy my passions. She had cast me as the lead in a school production of
Tom Sawyer
, one year before the harsh reality of staff underpayment brought an end to all the fun, having noted my enthusiasm for the performing arts. In what can sometimes be a sea of apathy, teachers are drawn moth-like to kids with light bulbs hovering over their heads. It gives them something to work with. I will be forever grateful to Dora Brooking, for not only spotting my light bulb but also helping me turn up the wattage.

Tom Sawyer
was an amazing experience for me. I had been cast at the end of my first year at Brockworth Comprehensive and taken a big thick script home with me for the holidays. I underlined all my dialogue with a red biro and was thrilled to see that barely a page turned without multiple scarlet slashes reminding me just how much I had bitten off. The show went on in November of the following school year and proved to be an extraordinary adventure.

I developed a huge crush on the girl playing Aunt Polly. She was sixteen, a full four years older than me, and was widely regarded as the prettiest girl in school. The smell of her perfume, coupled with the adrenalin rush of performing in front of five hundred people over two nights, created in me a powerful memory, which I can recall in full detail even now, twenty-eight years later. I didn’t necessarily decide to become an actor that year, but my love of performing was utterly secured and Dora knew she had found an ally who wouldn’t simply see her subject as a doss.

So it was that Dora called Mum and Mum called her friend Barbara Luck who ran the Gloucester Youth Theatre and arranged for me to start attending the weekly get-together, held on a large barge moored down at Gloucester Docks. I was extremely nervous about going, despite my love of performing. I didn’t know anybody other than Barbara who I had also developed a slight crush on after seeing her in
Sweet Charity
at the Cambridge Theatre in Gloucester Leisure Centre (I fell in love all the time as a kid).

As we pulled into the car park at the docks in our red Ford Escort, I could see the assembled theatre youths waiting for Barbara to arrive to let them on to the show boat. The group were rehearsing for their Christmas production,
Follow the Star
, on which I would serve as a technical assistant, having arrived too late in the season to audition for a part. I squinted into the darkness to get the measure of my fellow drama types and noticed very quickly that they were all female. This group of confident, outgoing women, who all knew each other, were about to take delivery of a goofy fourteen-year-old boy with a tendency to fall in love and a sense of moral confusion with regard to his carnal desires. This was only a matter of months after Meredith Catsanus’s titmageddon and a full two years before the girl over the road would so confidently unbuckle my belt. Suddenly, I was alone in the car. It was just me and this shadowy crowd of mysterious and exotic women. I couldn’t help myself. It just slipped out of my mouth, like an opportunistic prisoner noticing a hole in the fence. It was out before my brain could sound the alarm.

FUCK!

My mother’s shrill admonishment barely concealed her amusement and my own gasping apology was lost amid a fit of giggling. The Freudian significance of the comment was lost into the ether; so much more was the shock of hearing my barely broken voice utter this profanity in the back of a Ford Escort in 1984. There was no punishment though, only a warning about putting my brain into gear before I spoke. The incident progressed my relationship with my mum into a more adult phase, as if a certain spell had been broken between us, like discovering the truth about Santa, the Easter Bunny or God, and now I would occasionally hear her swear for comic effect or at least refer to swearing by making an ‘eff’ sound. It was a while before I dared utter the C-word in front of her, and when I did, it was met with far less amiable acceptance. I was a college boy by this time with some grasp of etymology and linguistics and my casual use of the word had been wilfully inflammatory.

‘Oh, come on, Mum,’ I sighed at her protest. ‘It’s just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It’s the same as “fuck”, it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn’t that really the issue here? We don’t want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It’s just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.’

She told me to go fuck myself.

The smell of the medina crept seductively into the courtyard of the riad and punched Simon Pegg full in the face as he wound the traditional Berber keffiyeh around his head.

‘Oooh, I’d love a tagine!’ Pegg enthused.

‘Sir?’ enquired Canterbury, who was dressed in a full burka so as not to anger the locals. This had nothing to do with the edicts of sharia law; robots were permitted to wander freely in Islamic territor ies. King Mohammed IV’s own robotic chamberlain, Abd Al-Ala, was often seen clanking through the souks purchasing spices or bartering over leather goods (the King had a thing for satchels). The problem was that Canterbury was something of a celebrity, famous for being aide to the world’s most famous international playboy and adventurer, and his presence in Marrakesh would doubtless cause alarm. This in turn would render Pegg’s disguise as a handsome, swarthy Berber trader absolutely pointless.

Also, Pegg had spray-painted a pair of tits on Canterbury’s breastplate after he got drunk on sherry at a Soup Dragons concert in 1991 and couldn’t get it off. He regretted the act enormously and had thought many times about spraying over the lewd graffiti but had refrained from doing so in case it invalidated his warranty. It was the same reason Pegg had refrained from removing Canterbury’s flashing earring, resulting in the asexual android being called ‘gaybot’ by some of the other automatons at the 1998 science expo at Earls Court.

‘A tagine . . .’ hissed Pegg through a day of stubble, which added to his disguise and also made him look even more handsome, which was impossible but if it wasn’t, it would have done, even though it couldn’t have but it did, ‘. . . is a sort of slow-cooked, North African stew, named after the ceramic pot in which it is cooked.’

‘Forgive my impertinence, sir,’ beeped Canterbury, ‘but I know what a tagine is. My own recipe for quail tagine with prunes and almonds received first prize in the 2005 Great Robotic North African Cook-Off, held at the Birmingham
NEC
and sponsored by
ASDA
. You were there.’

‘I know I was there,’ retorted Pegg hotly, ‘I was just slightly distracted by the little matter of Lord Black trying to turn the Oasis Centre into a hydrogen bomb. Do you have any idea how many goths would have died?’

‘That was the following year,’ replied Canterbury calmly, ‘you were actually one of the judges at the Great Robotic North African Cook-Off.’

‘Cock off!’ dismissed Pegg.

‘Cook-off,’ corrected Canterbury.

‘No, I mean cock off, I wasn’t there,’ clarified the charming adventurer.

‘Yes you were,’ Canterbury insisted.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ conceded Pegg. ‘I remember now, I voted for the Prime Minister’s Sexbot. He made these amazing Moroccan harost balls with dates, raisins and nuts that were absolutely to die for!’

‘What?!’ buzzed Canterbury, his computerised voice riddled with consternation.

‘Nothing,’ backtracked Pegg. ‘Forget I said anything.’