Contains spoilers from first sentence.

Downton Abbey’s 2012 Christmas offering bordered on the bizarre, subjecting 7.3 million viewers to clumsily introduced (and swiftly departing) romances, unmotivated Bitchy-Maid-Wars and, of course, the ‘unexpected’ bumping-off of its central character – Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens).

The overwhelming characteristic of this festively feature-length turkey was the linger. So. Much. Lingering. The lingering smiles which new maid Edna hurls towards Tom Branson number precisely 762, with further lingering scowls/looks of intense mistrust between ‘Shrimpy’ and Wife, as well as O’Brien and Doppelganger, not to mention the longing looks (lengthily documented, of course) to which Thomas subjects Jimmy. After nearly every line comes an unnecessarily lengthy shot of the actor’s face, in which they are apparently expected to express the sentiment of lines past and plotlines future, in some form of facial charades game.

Of course the climax of this episode is the car-crash (if you can pull the single car-crash from the surrounding car-crash which forms the rest of the episode. It’s like Inception. But with car-crashes.). The one none of us saw coming… Unless you’ve read any of this year’s interviews with Dan Stevens. Or any of the speculation over his reappearance in Series 4. In which case you were sat through the entire thing waiting for him to walk into the path of gunfire, fast-moving vehicles or a rogue and/or enraged stag. There was a moment in which the birth of his son inexplicably made Matthew feel like he’d ‘swallowed a box of fireworks’, where I thought they might have gotten really inventive.

The really surprising thing about the car-crash was its complete silence. We didn’t see a crash. We didn’t even hear one. We hear piano and violins. We see a leafy drive. We see a lucky escape for Dan Stevens. We see a spate of Facebook statuses railing against ITV’s lack of festive spirit.  

The real measure of the absurdity of Matthew Crawley’s ‘sudden’ death is the fact that ITV felt the need to release an explanation for it: the plot failed so entirely that the production company actually needed to release a statement to explain the real-life reasons behind its decisions: Dan Stevens decided not to renew his contract. 

In many ways (all ways?), the demise of Matthew Crawley can be seen as a mercy-killing, palpably on the cards since he was forced, by some extraordinary (and medically dubious) plotting, to miraculously leap out of his wheelchair last year. And this episode presented all of the reasons that an actor would choose to run for the (Highland) hills rather than renew a contract: dialogue more wooden than Bates’ leg and plotting less plausible than Matthew’s increasingly-yellow highlights (Compare series 1 to series 3. Mysterious.), not to mention ratings decreasing by nearly 1 million viewers since last year’s Christmas special. 

Even this episode’s lingering (yes, more lingering) shots of historical trains and a whole new National Trust property didn’t prevent it from inviting its audience to ask, after 3 series, “Is this the end of Downton Abbey, the pinnacle of period porn?” 

Homeland Series 2 has received a lot of stick over the last few months. Many found its pace occupied two extremes: either madcap fast or dawdling through boring conversations with irrelevant characters. Others took exception at its lack of credibility, particular highlights including Brody’s superpowered bunker-breaching phone signal (mine stops working if I stand underneath a particularly leafy bough) or Walden’s secret ‘off-button’ pacemaker. Carrie Matheson, previously the toast of TV reviewers everywhere, began to grate, both through her patented ‘cryface’ (see Buzzfeed/Anne Hathaway’s Impression on Saturday Night Live) or lack of respect for her own safety that bordered on lemming-esque. Surely, many have cried, Homeland has lost its way.

All of this is valid, and I agree with it to an extent, but I still have a lot of respect for the show. If anything, it is a victim of its own success. Series 1 was such a well-structured and tense affair that recapturing that genie was always going to be a tough task. Homeland’s original gambit, questioning the motives of Sergeant Brody, had a shelf-life; after the twists and turns of Series 1, the audience was left fairly certain of where its loyalties lay.

Indeed, as Series 2 rolled into view, it was originally unclear how the new status quo would hold together; many reviewers opined that the new ‘mystery’ was as to how far Brody had been turned away from his terrorist chums at the close of the first series, and the first couple of episodes appeared to conform to this structure. Brody as congressman was being pulled in more and more against his will as a kind of terrorist roadie, while trying to keep his family unawares, with Carrie attempted to rebuild her career in the CIA elsewhere. Fine. That would work.

But then the writers pulled the unexpected; they outed Brody to the CIA. The entire premise of the first season was undone – Carrie was right, and everything changed. And that’s when I realised what makes Homeland stand out from other shows. It still has the power to surprise me.

There are many, many ways in which Homeland is like How I Met Your Mother (remember the episode where Lily and Marshall accidentally killed the suicide vest tailor? Hilarious.) but one difference is their attitudes towards the premise that first begat their respective shows. How I Met Your Mother promises an eventual, cathartic end that it never delivers, and as the years go on the connection of the storylines to the titular reveal becomes more and more tenuous, leaving the show depleted of much that made it so watchable in the first place.

Homeland’s bravery is the antithesis of this, nonchalantly blowing apart cover stories, preconceptions (and various characters) on an almost weekly basis. And it didn’t stop at the CIA’s discovery this series – Brody’s suicide tape played across the nation was truly shocking TV in a way that’s hard to find these days. 

Certainly, there are a lot of flaws with Homeland – sometimes it stretches plausibility (though it’s no 24), and it often feels like the writers have forgotten previous plotlines. And Dana is really annoying.

But I think that Homeland has done fantastically well to work past its limitations – and even if it doesn’t stand up well against its previous self, it still stands up to most other shows in that kind of genre. I for one will be looking forward to Series 3 with great interest. Although the real reason I watch it, like everybody else, is for Saul. He’s like a walking hug with a beard.

Until the next series, you can always stay entertained with the sheer brilliance of Homeland-inspired internet insanity. Mostly this.

I’m not sure exactly what it was that attracted me to Merlin originally. It filled the Doctor Who slot like Robin Hood had before, and originally it seemed to fill a similar role; medieval legend retold with a young cast, sort-of Skins meets Margery Kempe. Based on Smallville, Merlin had a similar premise; a younger version of a famous character hides his superhuman gifts from the small community that he lives in, facing another malignant superhuman influence more or less every week.

And it was very watchable, albeit with the irritating lack of character development from week to week which characterises a lot of television. The jokes were reasonably funny, the special effects were OK, Anthony Head is always great and the young cast were all pretty likeable. Not a bad show. 

But none of that explains why Merlin became one of my favourite TV series of all time.

It’s fair to say that Merlin had stalled somewhat by the end of Series 2 – every week was more or less the same story, and any sort of development was limited. Sure, Morgana seemed to be turning against Uther, but she’d done that about three times before, and she always changed her mind. In Series 3, she finally turned permanently, and became an enemy of Camelot from within; Merlin seemed to have found some balls. And as Series 3 rolled in to series 4, more changed; Uther was killed off, and Arthur became King, a huge shift in the structure of the series. 

Morgana was discovered, and Arthur finally married Guinevere. Merlin himself changed too, becoming somewhat more serious and less impulsive, and gaining something of a killer instinct that belied the series’ teatime slot. Week by week the characterisation and consistency of the show seemed to improve, reaching its pinnacle in the final series. The weight of Merlin’s destiny, always the central issue of the show, became a driving force as Arthur’s death was foretold and Merlin made tough, often morally ambiguous or even arrogant, decisions each episode. The series clearly had a gameplan, so the stories felt tighter, the characters’ actions weightier and the silliness more palatable. 

The conclusion first felt like a bit of an anti-climax to me, especially considering the epic battle that was hinted at in the previous episode, but, on reflection, making the final episode one final journey of Merlin and Arthur was a good move. The show’s popularity always hinged on their relationship, and their ill-fated quest was a good reminder of that – that Merlin was never really about the magic, or the spectacle, but the relationship between characters. And that made it all the sadder when Merlin failed to save Arthur, or when Gwaine died having betrayed his King, or even Gaius’ promise to make Merlin his dinner. 

As I say, it’s hard to put my finger on why I enjoyed the show so much. Certainly I’ve always been a fan of the Arthurian myth, and generally ‘genre’ shows are my bag, but I think there’s more to it. As it improved over the years, I became somewhat invested in its progress, and in its success. Usually I’m quite blasé about these sort of things, but I felt slightly emotional as the show ended. I suppose that in a way I grew up with it, and its ending was something of a comment on my own impending adulthood. 

Or maybe I’ll just miss getting to stare at Katie McGrath every week (or Colin Morgan’s death-defying ears). Whatever the reason, I think that Merlin is an example of a show that took on criticism, and made story decisions that really benefited the quality of plot, rather than the propagation of the show itself. I’ll miss Merlin, but I’m also glad that it had the guts to make a proper ending that closed all the doors whilst still honouring its own conventions. And in the process, it made something magical. 

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Maybe it’s the luxury of having Out of the Blue serenade me almost every time I walk down Cornmarket, but the thought of a entire film dedicated to acapella didn’t exactly fill me with excitement. I prefer my instrument-free adaptations of 80s hits in short bursts when I’m slightly pissed at a college ball, but not stretched out to an hour and a half. The trailer for Pitch Perfect  smacked of a feature-length episode of Glee, and as much as I once held a soft spot for Mr Schu & Co. (I really did; their mashup of Halo and Walking on Sunshine was spectacular), I’d left that behind when the obnoxious identity politics got too much and everyone kept harping on about how they were Born This Way.

The ‘this year’s Bridesmaids‘ hype also had me hopeful, but when producers feel the need to go as far as replicating the poster in order to hammer the message home, alarm bells should be ringing. The ensuing attempt to repackage the former for a younger demographic consists largely of ripping off Bring It On and hoping no-one will notice, from the lingo (‘cheerocracy’/’aca-scuse me?’) to the angsty protagonist who eventually realises that beneath the eyeliner and black nailpolish her and the preppy girls are one and the same. Yay, sisterhood!

Bridesmaids‘ use of gross-out comedy to prove that, yes, the girls can do it too, was brilliantly executed, but sometimes excessive vomit can be just that: to borrow a phrase from 10 Things I Hate About You (a teen movie Pitch Perfect would have done well to learn from), the ‘digestive pyrotechnics’ on display are unnecessary, bizarre, and dangerously close to Scary Movie territory. 

To make matters worse, not only is the plot hopelessly cliched – it’s also riddled with offensive stereotypes. Stacie (Alexis Knapp) has a lot of sex and thus, of course, is also incredibly stupid, whilst Ester Dean’s Cynthia, the token lesbian, uses every available opportunity to letch upon her fellow singers. Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy is the film’s saving grace, singularly responsible for every memorable quote and, despite what the name would suggest, blessed with a comic genius that stretches far beyond jokes about her weight. 

Despite my love of a good montage, no amount of jazzy edits can change the fact that Pitch Perfect feels like a lazy amalgamation of the best teen movies of the past two decades, but without any of the original spark. In a strangely meta moment Ashley Greene’s Beca declares that she “doesn’t like movies; the endings are predictable”. Nothing could have been more true. 

While the crackers, wrapping paper and TV specials may now feel like a distant memory (though the Christmas stomach remains a terrible legacy), I can’t help but still feel a little Christmassy. This time of year generally never fails to remind me of a creative period in my life, when I volunteered to help script (and occasionally act) for a church youth group’s “alternative nativity”. I think it’s reasonable to say that, in hindsight, this period included some of the most embarrassing moments of my teenage life. And my late present to you is my shame. Hope you enjoy (it was on offer).

The first nativity I helped with was based around the idea of the traditional Christmas story from the perspective of the animals within the story (the donkey, the camel and the sheep) arguing as to who has the largest role within the story. The point and moral being that none of them are in the original story per se except the Donkey, and their involvement is largely superfluous – similar to how many of us centre the holidays around ourselves rather than its original Christmas message, etc. etc. My sister was in the director’s chair, and my contribution to the performance itself was an awful hammy turn as the self-centred Camel, the apex of which was probably an excruciatingly embarrassing a cappela solo of “Huw the Camel has…one hump” before trailing off into silence.

I was fourteen.

My memory of the writing process is a little fuzzy, but I can largely imagine my elder sister’s reaction to my input: “Oh yes Huw, that’s a good joke there. Not too easy to get either. They’re the best. You can just write that down in your special notepad – I’ll look through it later and try and add in all your bits if I have room.” Pinter never got that shit.

After the rounding success of the first nativity, we were encouraged to create another look at the story; in this case, it focused on non-participatory characters in the original biblical story. For example, one of the innkeepers who turned away Mary and Joseph for Health and Safety reasons, trainee angels who hadn’t passed their exams in time to join in and many others including my personal favourite, the shepherd who had nipped to the toilet and had thus not been summoned by the heavenly hordes of angels to meet the son of God.

The vignette, “sketch” style of this nativity meant that the writing was more easily split between me and my sister, so I have only myself to blame for creating the flamboyant character of Herod’s celebrity profiler (as my monologue memorably ended, “some things are difficult to put a good spin on”), who was outrageously camp and dressed to kill in a sort of yellow furry coat and sparkly top hat (I’m also pretty sure I put together the outfit). Alone on stage, wearing that, saying those lines…I’m not sure what I was trying to do to myself, but I think I may have been self-consciously murdering my own social life.

As my sister departed for university, I had to step up both to her directorial duties and full control of the writing. By this point I was sixteen and pretentious, so I basically went all postmodern and made it about a church youth group trying to put on an alternative nativity (largely so that I could smarmily self-reference the two previous shows), with said performance inexplicably (even to me) adopted by a Hollywood director to make into a great spectacle, thus LOSING THE REAL SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS IN THE COMMERCIALISM OR SOMETHING. I think that it got away from me somewhat (though everyone was very complimentary), largely due to my stress from having to direct as well. Next year, I vowed, for my nativity swansong, things would be different – I would reign in the spectacle, and keep things from getting too silly or over-ambitious

So of course I made it about a time-travelling alien trying to discover the true meaning of Christmas with numerous sound and visual special effects. To be honest, calling it a “Nativity” was a bit of a stretch. There was a caveman in it. In hindsight I have no idea what possessed me to structure the play on a Doctor Who knock-off that felt dated before it had even happened.  The level of historical accuracy in the time travel required almost super-heroic suspension of disbelief from the audience, and I can’t even remember what the “moral” was in that one (to be honest, it was probably something about not being distracted by commercialism and/or personal concerns at Christmas – pretty derivative of my earlier work, as I’m sure you’ll agree).

These might seem like less beloved Christmas memories. Some of the stuff I’ve admitted is a little embarrassing in hindsight (clearly my self-awareness hit puberty a little later than the rest of me), but overall I admit to having largely positive memories of being creative at Christmas. I always had a lovely and obliging cast to work with, and not an ounce of negativity from any audiences. I can’t say that it inspired any great playwriting talent in me (if anything, evidence suggests the opposite), but it was a lot of fun at the time, and I really shouldn’t begrudge the younger me a bit of a laugh at Christmas.

Though clearly I didn’t learn much from my own work – I just spent hundreds of words making the nativity story completely decentralised from its own meaning and focused it solely on myself.

Oh well. ‘Tis the season.

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★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Since Neighborhoods, Blink-182 have broken with their record label to produce the Dogs Eating Dogs EP. Recorded together as a group rather than in separate studios, it promised a new, more inventive and collaborative sound. The opening of ‘When I Was Young’ has all the vibrant elasticity that might be expected from an EP produced in such fertile circumstances. The same is true of ‘Disaster’: both these songs take the experimental approach to the band’s pop punk roots that we first heard in the eponymous 2003 album, but with half the conviction. Although the way these songs start seem eclectic and interesting, the ideas are not carried throughout. The simplistic structures which take over seem to let down the bold introductions, making the music sound confused and unsure of itself.

It might be refreshing, even interesting to begin with, but the gentle acoustic introduction to ‘Boxing Day’ turns out to suit its needy tone perfectly. Downbeat, even edging on dull, this song has been done before – and they know it. DeLonge’s caustic SoCal drawl is the only thing which really makes the song sound any different from the consummately disposable versions produced in their thousands by armies of adolescent boybands.

Although perhaps not the most exciting on the disc, the final track, ‘Pretty Little Girl’, promises the most for the next full album. Here the reconciliation of the band’s older school pop punk and newer experimentalism is by far the most successful and the point of the track does seem, in some respects at least, clear and effective. Until Yelawolf’s surprise rap, the actual content of the song doesn’t seem that original, but at least it succeeds where most of its colleagues failed – really engaging with the listener by reworking older, well-known sounds into something fresher. It’s the rap that really makes this though. Just like with Robert Smith in ‘All of This’, the band move differently around each other and around the music. This more sensitive sound generates the kind tensions which make music interesting, and which suggest better things to come in 2013.

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Life of Pi is a new, ‘magic-realist fable’ with academy-award winning Ang Lee as director and a huge digital-effects budget. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, is the answer. Don’t let the stirring electric drums of Sigur Ros and Coldplay (the cheek…) in its international trailer delude you – or the fact that it contains the only ‘pretty’ bits of the entire film.  If you want to see Life of Pi, you might be better off watching the trailer on YouTube instead. 

It gets off to a tortuously numbing start, which pointlessly illustrates Pi’s childhood in India. I know it’s called Life of Pi, but I don’t know if Lee’s literal attempt at a birth-to-mid-life-crisis timeline was the way to go. Sadly, this numbing doesn’t seem to subside once Pi’s actual journey begins. Even the disaster scene of the shipwreck seems futile – and frankly very mundane if you’ve ever seen Titanic. Which we all have. At 20 minute intervals I found myself glancing around at my fellow sufferers, updating my Twitter feed and re-re-checking the release date of Django Unchained.  If this was the rate Pi was going to live his life, it could have been 2013 by the time I left. I hoped it was 2013 by the time I left.

As a further criticism to this, we cannot expect the most radical and genius of wit to arise from a PG film, but at the same time, this does not justify the excruciating surrogates which surfaced. Yes, the schoolboy ‘pissing’ pun on Pi’s (hilariously witty) full name ‘piscine’ did make a few 8 year-olds crow with laughter, but I, along with the premiére-seat pensioners at the back, wasn’t even going to try to change my deadpan expression. When I found myself smiling, it was at the shots of overfed hippos grazing to a badly, badly judged majestic overture.

So, what is good about Life of Pi?  If nothing else, its digital effects are incredible. The CGI tiger Richard Parker is remarkably lifelike and so should be, starring as the supporting act – or even protagonist. It wasn’t hard to be on a more similar wavelength as those tiger-shaped pixels than the infuriatingly irrational Pi.  Lee does also succeed in breaking the stagnancy of Pi’s journey by whisking us now and then into a glittering and kaleidoscopic unreality (not always making sense), which somewhat illuminates Pi’s daily, and frankly quite pedestrian, lifeboat ritual. Why that whale illustrated in the trailer turns fluorescent, God knows. And even still, the whale’s visual perfection does not, in any way, justify IMDB’s ludicrously high rating of 8.4, which surpasses even James Cameron’s Avatar. It is, without doubt, an optical masterpiece though. What I expect happened was that Lee got a bit too happy over the CGI, and forgot he was supposed to be directing a film. Not an incongruous, 2 hour long advert.

The cherry on top of this cinematic let-down though was, without doubt, its infuriating / anticlimactic / ‘…really?’ / void ending. As the screen fades to black, the spectator silently wills that Lee will pull something startling out of the bag at the last second: Reversal of expectation? Catharsis? The return of Richard Parker? Unsurprisingly, the audience is left (in my experience, at least,) exasperated. Pi’s wife in Canada isn’t even his childhood sweetheart: a satiating ending which even the simplest of films could master. Yes, that girl whose name we can’t remember, but who for some reason was allowed to consume at least 15 minutes of valuable screen time.

If anything, the film is a bombsite (or shipwreck) of unanswered questions and ambiguity. With a middle-aged Pi banging on about ‘believing in God’, and a junior-school Pi trying to follow three religions, you’d think the teenage Pi would encounter one or two instances of divine intervention. Apparently not. So, does the story make you believe in God? Not really. Does the story make you believe in anything? Thanks to the film’s superfluous digital effects, I’d be inclined to say no. If you’d like to pay £7.45 for post-trailer betrayal and a trippy daydream (nightmare?) go and see Life of Pi.  If you want to watch a film, go and see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.