It's Death Jimbo, But Not as We Know It

With the end of Ashes to Ashes last Friday, there now won't be anything worth watching on TV until the BBC gets the rights to The Ashes back in a few years time. The rest of the world has probably forgotten about it already, but as I only caught up with the finale on Iplayer yesterday.....

It turned out that the series was set in a form of Purgatory. There can't be many TV series that last for 3 series (5 if you count Life on Mars) where all the main characters are dead. Gene Hunt, it turns out, was also a dead cop, whose role it was to see other cops who died before their time safely through the right door. In A2A, the door in question is a pub.

If a round in the Railway Arms was heaven (echoes of the banquet parables?), then Hell was the basement of a police station, with Jim Keats as Satan. He plays the role of the tempter/tester all the way through, questioning the teams faith in Hunt, and trying to lure them away from him. At the end though, the team still have a choice - do they step through the door Keats is offering them, or do they choose to walk away. Temptation never forces you to do anything, the choice is still ours.

There's even an echo of CS Lewis 'Screwtape Letters' in the reports which Jim Keats 'files' on the A2A website: Do you like to be called “sir”, sir? I don’t. Don’t like Chief Inspector or even Mister. I like it when people call me “Jimmy” or “Jimbo” or “Pencil Neck” or “Four Eyes”. Why? Because it means they are under-estimating me. And that is when I am at my most effective. My most powerful. Discuss.

Later on : As for my report on DCI Hunt - it is finished. I must say, it makes for fascinating reading. Fascinating.
“And you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
John Chapter 8, verse 32. I believe. I know my Bible. Must know almost every verse.

I'm kicking myself now that I didn't pick up those clues, unlike a colleague in my pub quiz team who gave me his idea of what was happening last week, and turned out to be pretty much spot on. The writers are completely up front about Keats being the Devil (see 'The Conclusion' vid here). And it turns out my theory about the Quattro numberplate and a link to July 7th was completely wrong. The biggest clue of all, of course, is the title of the show.

The spell in purgatory/limbo seems to function a bit like the Wizard of Oz (which gets repeatedly referenced through the series). Ray comes to terms with his guilt and becomes both wiser and more humane (a heart?), Chris gets his courage (the lion), Shaz gets recognition. It seems to be completing the work of personal growth that was interrupted by their premature deaths, but these changes only happen because of Alex's intervention: with just Gene Hunt as their 'guv', the three are stuck. The ferryman on the Styx needed a shove to get him all the way across, and that was Alex's job.

Great ending: Hunt back in his office looking at a brochure for a new car, to replace the beloved Quattro ("you murdered my car!"), when a new arrival bursts in "where's my desk, where's my Iphone?" and Hunt is back into action. Heaven as an inn with Jesus as the landlord: 'in my Fathers house are many rooms'. Not far off. So what does really happen after we die...?..good one to chat about over a pint.

UK Border Agency: Gene Hunt is Alive and Well and Working in Cardiff?

Yesterday the Guardian had a piece on allegations about the UK Border Agency office in Cardiff, which has resulted in an investigation by MPs.

Claims that asylum seekers are mistreated, tricked and humiliated by staff working for the UK Border Agency are to be investigated in parliament.

The home affairs select committee chairman, Keith Vaz, has called for an investigation following allegations that officials at one of the government's major centres for processing asylum seekers' claims express fiercely anti-immigration views and take pride in refusing applications.

Louise Perrett, who worked as a case owner at the Border Agency office in Cardiff for three and a half months last summer, claims staff kept a stuffed gorilla, a "grant monkey", which was placed as a badge of shame on the desk of any officer who approved an asylum application.

The whole thing sounds like Life on Mars. I sincerely hope it's not true, but that might just be mindless optimism. The realist in me puts this alongside the conditions at Yarlswood , the practice of child detention, and the other issues with UK Borders Agency, and wonders if it's fit for purpose. Yes this is just one office, and yes we do need border controls, and a functioning structure for sorting out genuine asylum seekers from people who just fancy our benefits system. I wonder if politicians are afraid to tackle this because they don't want to be seen as 'soft' on immigration?

Ht Split Horizons.

Other reports
BBC
Wales Online
No Borders South Wales campaigning group who've been picketing the Cardiff office for a while now.

What would the Rabbi say to the Spin Doctor?

Just had a very good few days at Spring Harvest in Minehead, 2 questions buzzing round my head:

1. Would Jesus have called Derek Draper to be one of his disciples? At SH we've been looking at the story of the call of Matthew the tax collector, among other things. Collaborator, crook, thief, traitor, probably had people beaten up for non-payment, generally an unpleasant guy. Everyone else would have pilloried him, Jesus called him. And he changed.

Who else's name could you put in there?

2. Why did the BBC pull the 'religion' programme in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle on Easter Monday? It's now being shown tomorrow night, and timetabled nicely so that you can catch the first episode of the new Ashes to Ashes. Lee is the man behind 'Jerry Springer, the Opera', but the series has been one of the treats of the early spring, on the whole both very funny and very thoughtful, though some of the skits have started to get a bit Chris Morris. The fact the Beeb didn't want to show the religion episode on the Easter weekend suggests they were a bit wobbly about the content.

On Spring Harvest itself, more in a couple of days, it's interesting to read what Dave Walker thought of it all.

Ashes to Ashes

"Do you remember a guy that's been
In such an early song
I've heard a rumour from Ground Control
Oh no, don't say it's true
They got a message from the Action Man
"I'm happy, hope you're happy too
I've loved all I've needed to love
Sordid details following" (David Bowie 'Ashes to Ashes')

Great news that Ashes to Ashes is to get a 2nd series. After a slightly uneven opening - ropey Miami Vice pastiche versus 80's soundtrack overdrive - it's settled down into compulsive viewing, as Life on Mars was before. The central mystery of Life on Mars - mad, coma or back in time - has been replaced by the will-they-wont-they of Alex Drake and Gene Hunt. We know she's in a coma, trying to find the trigger event in her subconscious that will get her out of it and back to real life in 2008. We also know now that the car bomb that killed her parents wasn't that trigger event.

The whole series has been buildling up to this, and there were some great twists. In between Alex driving a pink tank over a parked car, and Lord Scarman getting locked in a cell with dozens of Gay Pride marchers, were Alex's desperate attempts to stop the bombing taking place - take out the car, take out the murderer, take out her parents, yet in the end it still happened. The scene where her dad suddenly became The Clown, the Death figure of the series, as the bomb went off, was superb. Watching the credits, we wondered why we'd not spotted that the same actor played both characters....

One big question is whether the things Alex is 'discovering' in 1981 are all in her imagination. Did her mother really have an affair with the family's best friend? Did her dad blow himself and her mother up in a car bomb? Was mum about to quite work to spend more time with her daughter because she loved her so much? Or is this all cobblers, the fevered wishful thinking of a dying mind? At least we'll be spared all those embarassing Alex & Mum emoting sessions now....

Questions for the next series:

- the obvious one, about Alex & Gene

- what will happen with the secret file which Gene stole from the security bunker and locked in his desk?

- will Alex pray? Given the Sunday school background that the first half of series one sketched in, will we get any more of this?

- what happens with David Threlfalls creepy villain?

- do we get more of Lord 'I'll be keeping an eye on you DCI Hunt' Scarman? Hope so.

Can Alex be Saved?

In terms of spiritual parallels, I couldn't help watching Alex Drake and thinking of lots of Christians I've come across. Not for the outfits, but for her attitude. Here is someone who only cares about the world she's in so far as it helps her to escape it, and be 'saved' to somewhere else. She speaks a foreign language to the people around her, spouting psychobabble at every opportunity, and making little effort to explain her language or behaviour. Is Gene's thuggery, or Alex's selfishness, the worse sin? Had she been ugly as well as obnoxious, she wouldn't have got very far. Part of her journey is learning to care about the world she finds herself in, rather than despising it, and the people in it. By the end of the series she faces a challenge - do I continue to live for the future, or do I live in the present?

As Christians it's very easy to spend so long in another world - the Christian cultural bubble - that we find it hard to talk about faith with people who don't live in the bubble with us. I think the church is miles better now at being positive about the world around it, and brings an approach of care and engagement rather than condemnation and superiority.

In the end the greatest commandments are to love God, and to love others. It's not about 'my' salvation, or about other people being a means to our ends, it's when we truly love and care about others more than we care about our own salvation, that's when we're ready to go home. And that's when we realise why we're here.

More TV to discuss down the pub

Finally caught up with last weeks Ashes to Ashes, which seems to have got over a disjointed first episode and become rather good - not quite up to Life on Mars but close enough. After all, we know (don't we?) that she's in a coma this time... Intriguing to have a central character with a strong Sunday school background - her Bible memory verses from childhood prove crucial to solving a murder. Gene Hunt has his own rejoinder: "Anything you say will be taken down as evidence then ripped up and stuffed down your scrawny throat. Gene Hunt, Chapter 1 verse 2". Alongside all the Hunt-isms, the series has had some fascinating moments already: a brief snapshot of the birth of the yuppie Thatcherite dream in episode 2, and in the week that a man was jailed for murdering 5 prostitutes, a poignant reminder of how difficult it was, and still is, for rape victims to get justice.

Meanwhile The Last Enemy on Sunday night is perfect wind-down material after slaving away over a hot communion table. And it has Robert Carlyle. It's also trying to make a serious point about the surveillance society - the host page (see link) has various facts and figures about ID cards, CCTV and fingerprinting.

On PMQs today there was a question about extending the DNA database. Yes it's helped with criminal convictions, but there is a trade-off between quality of life and quantity of personal information held by the state, and the freedoms we are prepared to deny ourselves in pursuit of security. The suggestion in The Last Enemy is that the state can't be trusted with this information and power. Matt Wardman has a good post on the issue today. The 'surveillance society' debate is a distant cousin of the sharia debate, as both are linked in people's minds with militant Islam, and the need to be protected from it.

It would be good to see civil liberties/surveillance society issues addressed by some of the better minds in the church. However, I couldn't find anything on Rowan Williams or Tom Wrights website. The only thing on Ekklesia was 3 years old and was about a group representing the non-Christian faith groups in the UK. There is one, fairly brief, article on Theos, and a couple of their debate topics touch on the issue without addressing it directly. The Christians who do campaign on civil liberties issues seem to be mostly concerned with a few narrow issues around sexuality and reproduction - e.g. whether parents who don't think homosexuality is ok can be allowed to foster by their local councils.


There is a torrent of legislation at the moment affecting personal freedoms and identity: 42 day detention, DNA database, ID cards, ASBO's and youth justice; why are we all so quiet about it?

30 minutes later.... I take it all back. Well, most of it. There was a weighty report passed 235 votes to 2 at the Church of England General Synod a couple of weeks ago, arguing against the extension of detention without charge, and with substantial sections on law and liberty. It concludes:

In reflecting on these topics, Christian faith has no privileged insight which circumvents the hard work of analysis and moral deliberation. What it has is an understanding of human nature before God as embracing the best and the worst. On the one hand, it is aware of men and women created in the image of God, carrying a claim to just and respectful treatment which no so-called political necessity or security crisis can abolish. On the other, it is aware – supremely through the event of the crucifixion of the Lord of glory – of the destructive acts of which people are capable when driven by hatred, fear, self-righteousness and self-deception.

Gene Hunt vs Derek Conway

Tory MP Derek Conway has had the whip removed after paying his son £40k of taxpayers money, yet 'no record' had been found of said son doing any work for him. Inquiries are still pending, but this is the latest in a long line of dodgy financial stories coming out of Westminster. A few months ago it seemed that the North-East was the epicentre of financial scandal (the 'dead' canoeist who's life insurance bankrolled his wife's flat in Panama, a Labour financer who had donated via a proxy etc.). That epicentre has moved down to London.

Meanwhile, several million people are cancelling all engagements for Thursday 7th Feb, as Gene Hunt returns to our screens, in Ashes to Ashes, the sequel the magnificent Life on Mars. What has this got to do with Derek Conway? Bear with me.

The core plot to Life on Mars, and Ashes to Ashes, is a police officer who ends up 'back in time' - in Life on Mars it turned out to be (we think!) just Sam Tyler's vivid dreams whilst in a coma. The challenge for Ashes to Ashes will be to lay a different trail of clues for how Alex Drake got to be in 1981. For both of them, catapulted into Gene Hunts sexist, brutal, no-nonsense world from the form-filling, psychological profiling noughties, the challenge is a) how to get back home and b) how to maintain their integrity and values in a world which works in a completely different way to what they're used to.

The classic story of Ulysses and the Sirens tells of how Ulysses had himself bound to the mast of his ship, so that the Sirens call wouldn't tempt him to his death. It's a great parable about temptation, and how we need to master it. Ulysses needs not only the willpower - to decide in advance (not the heat of the moment) that he will not be drawn off course - but also the help of his crew, who tie him up and refuse to let him go even when the Sirens cry is yanking his soul out of his body.

In some ways it's easier for Sam Tyler (Life on Mars) and Alex Drake (Ashes to Ashes) to maintain integrity. They know they are in an alien world, and that they don't belong there. But every MP in Westminster is part of the club, and unless you've decided in advance what your standards are, and found other people to help you keep them, it's easy to lose your integrity, and let standards drop. It's the same in the playground, the workplace, even a church.

It's back to whether we are thermostats or thermometers: do we 'set the temperature' and influence the world around us, or do we merely reflect the environment we are in? There does seem to be a Westminster culture that has forgotten that MP's expenses are taxpayers money, and that honesty is a non-negotiable, not something that can be traded in for, say, the deputy leadership of the Labour party.

And if you ring me next Thursday between 9-10pm and get the answerphone, it's because I'm somewhere in 1981 with Gene Hunt. 'Lets fire up the Quattro.'