NOVEMBER

CRAFTING

Many years ago, I was given a set of Enterprise models by a friend who was having a clear out. The ships were all to scale and went from the original NCC 1701 all the way through to the Enterprise-E. None of the models were painted, and there was a single sheet with all the decals on. I used to make model aeroplanes when I was a teenager, but my set of paints and brushes had long since dried out, and I never really felt the urge to go out and spend money on new paints and kit, so the ships all sat collecting dust.

The smaller ones (the ships were all to scale) got thrown in a box and put in the loft at some point, and a lot of the parts went missing. The Enterprise-A ended up as a feature in a terrarium, and the Enterprise-D seems to have long since departed on its own voyages, but the Enterprise-C ended up on my bookshelf, mainly because I have been writing a story about the adventures of Captain Garrett and her crew for the last 25 years.

I have recently resurrected this project and decided to try and finish it, and because I would rather do anything than write, that meant I needed a a gold Enterprise-C model on my desk, just like the ones you see in the ready rooms and offices of many Captains and Commanders.

I had bought the gold leaf about five years before, but it's a very difficult material to work with. The leaf itself is incredibly thin, to the point where breathing on it can cause it to fold up onto itself, whereupon it becomes a crumpled ball of gold foil. I went to YouTube to watch some videos on how to lay gold leaf and then jumped in, reasoning that the first thing I made would be a practice run.

The saucer section turned out to be the easiest, as it was just about the same size as a sheet of the gold leaf. Putting on the glue was much like painting, but I didn't need to worry so much if it looked sloppy. This coat of glue, which is watered down, is then left for about 12 hours until it turns tacky. Then comes the nerve-racking task of laying the gold leaf down onto the sticky section. As you might imagine, it sticks instantly and if it just so happens to be in the wrong place, too bad because it will tear if you try and move it. Once the sheet is down a very soft brush is used to bring out the details of the model underneath, which due to the thinness of the gold works really well.

I was plased with the result and carried on with the rest of the ship over the next few days. The sides and rear of the ship were both really fiddly and didn't work quite so well as the saucer. The nacelles presented their own problems as they were each half a sheet in size, but the gold needed to be wrapped around. I kept finding gaps and finished up having to use little patches to fill these in.

Once I was finished I cannibalised an old trophy to make a stand for the model and it now indeed sits on my desk. Now all I have to do is write the story that goes with it.

The project has. The one that interested me the most was the Enterprise-C, as I had a story that I’d half written that was about Rachel Garrett.

I thought about making a desk model to sit and look at as I wrote the story, but I wanted something more like the ships they had on the show, which were gold and on a stand in Picard’s or Sisko’s offices. A quick search on eBay revealed that there was a gold leaf kit you could buy, but from the few videos I’d watched on YouTube, it looked a bit too fiddly.

BOARD GAMES

My gaming group, Section 31, held their annual Halloween gaming event on the 1st of November. I didn’t dress up, but lots of people did, and there were some really great costumes. My favourite was the lady who went dressed as Ripley from Alien. My not-so-favourite thing was the games, unfortunately.

I have a very fractious relationship with games, and have sold off most of my board game collection because of several bad experiences. The problem is that I no longer enjoy gaming, and enjoy even less the whole business of showing up at an event, having to ‘negotiate’ the business of deciding on what to play and then wasting hours on something that is unenjoyable. This isn’t just isolated incidents, but every time I go to a board game event I always come away feeling like I’ve wasted my time and money.

Having whittled down my collection somewhat, I now have only a few games which I actually want to try and play, but even these aren’t guaranteed to be fun. These games are not ‘new’ however, which seems to be the criterion that most gamers now use to determine whether they want to play something. The problem with a new game of course is that you have to learn how to play them.

I started the evening by meeting some new people, who were very nice and friendly and who taught me a game about cats sitting on blankets (or something), though the actual gameplay was more about colours and shapes. It was a victory point game, which I’m not generally good at as I don’t have a maths brain and, though I can do numbers, I can’t do lots of numbers, especially when it’s other people’s numbers, and especially when I can’t see those numbers because they haven’t happened yet. That game, with its accompanying explanation, took about an hour, then someone else asked if I’d like to play something that involved economics in Indonesia, to which I replied, ‘of course!’.

After finding some very nice food, which had been made by the guy with the cat blanket game, the Indonesian economy game turned out not to be happening because it was going to take too long. I was then asked if I knew about Brass, to which I replied ‘the metal?’. But this turned out to be a popular game that was 'the top-selling board game of the year'. It was apparently an economics game set in Birmingham during the Industrial Revolution, and so I sat down and ate my food while the owner of the game told me everything I was going to need to know about playing this game. During these moments I am always reminded of the Aunty Donna video on explaining a board game, and their summary of what it feels like was pretty much spot on.

The game, when it started, was incomprehensible, uneventful, and confusing. The other player’s turns seemed to take a long time, and my turns were brief as they involved the other player’s telling me what I should do. After about three hours, it was all over, and I was last. The game, it turns out, had nothing to do with economics and wasn’t fun to play at all. What made matters worse was that I had brought my own economics game, that really was an economics game, called Power Grid, but nobody had ever heard of it, so they didn’t really want to play it.

After many hours, I hadn’t really played anything I’d liked, and nobody was interested in anything I had brought, so I went home and thought about whether it was worth selling the rest of the board games I own.

TV

Plur1bus

It really is amazing how they can cram a 15 minute episode into an hour

This show is very, very, very slow. I would say that it's like wading through treacle, but I like treacle. It's the same deal as Andor, Obi Wan, Severance, Foundation and the appropriately named Slow Horses. Though I did like the central sci-fi concept of Plur1bus and I was totally hooked in by the first half, the second half slowed to a crawl and practically stopped. In the old days of television, when viewers had other channels they could change to, this would have been an episode of X-Files (which Vince Gilligan also worked on), or maybe a two parter. I can only think that Gilligan's initial concept was reworked to fit the streaming model as his previous hits, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were not paced like this; they were episodic with a season arc. This really feels like a two-parter episode or a movie that's been stretched out.

It's really frustrating watching something like this because you just know they are going to drag out the story to 10 episodes and then pull some cliffhanger ending, which will take another two years to be unsatisfactorily resolved in another damn series. After watching the first three episodes I started skimming through the boring bits and then using the next episode's catch-up section to figure out what happened. In fact, I'm thinking of watching the whole thing in about 10 minutes by just watching all the little catch-up sections and then the final episode.

The Totally Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin

This is the latest comedy show from Noel Fielding, who was once one half of the Mighty Boosh; rather appropriately it is about half as funny. Don't get me wrong, this still makes it funnier than most of the comedy shows that have come out in the last few years, but I miss the craziness of shows like Luxury Comedy and the Boosh, which were frankly surreal, to the point of being performance art. I always considered Fielding and co. to be on a par with the great Vic Reeves, and both were art school alumni, which gave what they were doing another level of creative genius. In both cases Reeves & Mortimer and the Mighty Boosh seemed to float free of any constraints or restrictions concerning meaning or logic. They were funny in and of themselves, but seemed more hilarious because you had no idea where they might go. It was wonderful to see the imagination and creativity of these artists being set free from the convention of other tv shows, which was also what made Monty Python and the Goon Show before them so funny.

With Dick Turpin being an Apple show I am left wondering whether some of these freedoms have been curtailed by some of the executive producers. I have heard from other sources that Apple is currently throwing tons of money at its productions and letting its creators have all the creative freedom it wants, to the point that everyone in the industry is now clammoring to work with Apple above all the other streaming platforms. In the case of this show however, although there is still plenty of craziness, I get the sense that it has been reigned in a bit. Maybe Noel is getting a bit more sensible in his old age (he's the same age as me btw). With all the above in mind though, I do consider this show to be a hit and I really enjoyed it a lot. Like all of Noel's projects since the Boosh disbanded, it do miss the chemistry that Julian Barrett brought to the mix, and as with all double acts that went their separate ways you only realise what's been lost when its gone.

Will Barrett ever appear in Dick Turpin? I'd love that, but it seems unlikely. There are a lot of well known comedy actors in the series, including Noel's brother Mike, who plays his brother on the show. Dick Turpin's father is played my the excellent Mark Heap, who's CV is probably one of the most impressive of any comedy actor working today with Spaced, Green Wing, Blue Jam and Brass Eye amongst his credits. There are too many other British comedy names to list in the regular cast, as well as guest stars like Rich Fulcher and Gregg Davis, but I will give a special mention to Dolly Wells who appeared alongside Noel in his Comedy Vehicle shows on Channel 4, and who seems to be carving a place for herself in the pantheon of great British comedy actors.

There weren't really any bad moments in any of the shows and the lack of regard for historical accuracy is all there in the title of the show. Nobody is going to get upset that this isn't a true and faithful account of the real Dick Turpin (if indeed such a person existed) and I can't help feeling that the writers might have been having a dig at some other so-called historical accounts that Hollywood has put out over the years.

What makes the show for me is that Noel Fielding plays the whole thing pretty much as you would expect Noel Fielding to play it. There is no attempt to alter the language or historical setting of the characters to fit it in with the time it's set, which can be a bit jarring at times, but it works perfectly with the tone of the show.