St. Valentine's Day potpourri

I never could get the hang of St. Valentine's Day. Aside from the confusing idea that there's a patron saint of soppy greeting cards, I don't have much time for holiday's that demand a particular emotion be displayed on cue. Christmas I don't mind because it's a large enough holiday that it can encompass a whole spectrum of sentiments from a feeling of goodwill toward men, to mild nostalgia, to barely contained hostility toward people I've spent the rest of the year avoiding. New Years, on the other hand, I can't abide since I passed the age when any excuse for a booze up was welcome. It's like one of those parties full of people in their late 30s desperately trying to having a good time as their youth slips away from them and failing miserably.

St. Valentine's Day (or Valentine's Day or Val Day or VD or whatever) I couldn't stomach when I was single. If I didn't have a girlfriend at the time, it was a tactless reminder that my evenings revolved around B movies and beer, and if I did have one, it reminded me that I was one forgotten bunch of roses from the B&B routine. Now that I'm a family man, it means that I have a pre-scheduled appointment to rekindle romance on a day when the hand of Fate are sure to throw the banana skin of Destiny under my foot.

This year, for example, Der Tag corresponded with a load of insane (and ill-paying) writing gigs, my daughter's midwinter school holidays, and our having to babysit my in-laws dogs. The latter are nice enough canines, though the lab is square in the stupid-but-affectionate category and the border collie is a frustrated lap dog. Add in our own miniature pack (one neurotic and the other jealous) and a seven-year old girl and Chez Szondy was about as peaceful as a Lord of the Flies reunion dinner.

Then there are the absurdities of buying Valentine presents. There was a time when buying something flash like a gold necklace was a winning impulse, but now the wedding band on my left hand is a reminder that the lolly is coming out of company funds and that my better half does the books, so I have to walk a fine line between not showing enough affection and blowing the family budget. So there I was in the local Barnes and Nobles looking for the right gift at the right price.

Have you looked in a bookshop around Valentine's Day? I couldn't' believe it. I expected leather bound copies of Romeo and Juliet and slushy gift books that cost about a quid a page, but I was not prepared for what was on offered. Lovers of History Who Died Horrible Deaths? Vampire Sex Manual? Great Hook Up Lines That Will Bypass Her Frontal Lobes and Head Straight For the amygdala? It's not so much shocking as being back at one of those thirtysomething parties I referred to earlier.

Despite what was cavorting on the display tables like Dutch window girls past their sell by date, I happen to like book shops and very few things bring me more peace than idly thumbing through the tomes–especially if there's a coffee shop attached where I can revive the tissues. Unfortunately, it also means that I start channeling my inner James May, which is not the best match for looking for romantic prezzies. "Oh, look, there's a book on trainspotting and there's a the collected Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now where's that Kama Sutra?"

Just doesn't work.

What also doesn't work is that home life is rarely conducive to maintaining a romantic mood. Take the other evening when my wife was inspecting our daughter's ant colony and fell for the old "Missus! Come look at me mate! I think he's sick or something!" Long story short, she opened the lid of the colony to rescue what she thought was an ant in distress only to have the little arthropod make a break for it across the dresser top. I was summoned to recapture the fugitive, which I did, and as I returned him to the colony while being as gentle as possible with that fragile little life the minute bastard sunk his jaws into my fingertip and pumped half his body weight's worth of formic acid into it. Within five minutes, my finger felt as if someone was pounding it repeatedly with a hammer and deriving a great deal of satisfaction from it.

Do you know what you can do for an ant bite? Absolutely bloody nothing. All you can do is let it run it's course, which in practical terms translates into sitting there with tears streaming down your face while the wife asks you what's wrong and if you want to go to hospital. That, of course, is not an option because all that will happen is that the medicos will tell you to stick your finger in ice water which means that instead of having a finger throbbing with pain, you'll have a very cold finger throbbing with pain. So, I took the coward's way out and downed an Excedrin PM; not because I thought it would relieve the pain, but because it would put me in a drug induced coma where I wouldn't care.

I awoke from this several hours later with a finger that no longer hurting, but still uncomfortably numb so that typing the letters F, R, T, G, V, B, D, and the numbers 5 and 6 is extremely unpleasant. At least it doesn't include any vowels, so small blessings must be counted.

Another thing that doesn't help one stay in the Orphean mood is that the "reimagined" version of Survivors aired last night on BBC America. Regular readers of this column know where this is going. I have little love for modern television in general, the BBC in particular that has fallen so far from its halcyon days of The Pallisars et al, and of remakes especially. My dislike of the latter is so great that my wife often asks me, "What do you want them to do? Just repeat the original episodes?" To which my reply is an emphatic "Yes!"

I rather liked the original version of Survivors back in 1975. The idea of a series where a Red Chinese biowar virus is accidentally released, destroys most of the world's population, and leaves the British Isles with a surviving population of roughly 10,000 was an intriguing idea, though it lacked enough technophobic vampires for my taste–more in the vein of the British quiet catastrophe. It was well-written, well-acted and generally believable, though, produced during the heyday of the self-sufficiency fad, it did overestimate the difficulty of basic living in a depopulated Britain. With warehouses stocked with food and plenty of petrol still to be had to run tractors, it was never explained why our heroes, only a few weeks after the disaster, are struggling to plough fields with horses and grinding flour with a mortar and pestle instead of concentrating on more important things like securing machinery, spare parts, or fuel. Why spend time fixing old machines when new ones are there for the asking? Or why the only weapons they have are shot guns when Sterlings and mortars are only an Army base and a crowbar away.

Compared to the modern version, though the 1975 original was Hamlet. Where the original explained the entire back story of the plague during the opening credits, the remake took approximately the time required for the Alps to form. Where the original killed off the world's population in 20 minutes of screen time, the remake goes into agonising, excruciating detail as I swear I saw all six billion victims expire one by one. Or did it only seem that way? Of course, everything is accompanied by incessant background music including a sad piano tune that was repeated so often that it is surely grounds for prosecution, shaky camera work, and that character-circling cameraman-chased-by-a-badger shot that I thought was placed under a moratorium back in 2005.

And the cast. Oh, Lord the cast! This being the 21st century BBC, Survivors wasn't cast so much with dramatic possibilities in mind as in making sure that the multiculti quotas are all filled and give the impression that the non-white percentage of the British population is approximately that of South Africa. This is rather difficult on a show where you posit a survival rate of 1 in 5000. With those sort of odds, and the fact that non-whites make up about 8 percent of the population and that most of those are in cities where a pandemic would cause the most damage, it's most likely that Survivors would have a cast whiter than the audience at an Osmonds concert. The racism and condescension behind this sort of casting gets on my wick. I wouldn't mind if the BBC did this out of poetic licence. Hell, if including Patterson Joseph, the only decent actor in this train wreck, means indulging in poetic licence, then I'll vote for one that can bend the space time continuum. Or if it had been for some dramatic reason to make some sort of point germane to the plot, it might have been justifiable. But instead the BBC rolls out a tiresome checklist that could come from any other programme on the schedule where the sole purpose is not be "hideously white", bourgeois, or to look anything like Middle Britain. There is the,

• Middlesex banker's wife heroine becomes Scottish lower middle class.
• The Saudi playboy with the perpetual metrosexual stubble
• A character who in the original was a shifty, middle aged Welsh tramp and is now a hunky English killer with a MYSTERIOUS PAST
• The white helicopter pilot who is now a black survivalist
  
• A devout Muslim boy who will no doubt act as the moral conscience of the show
• The obligatory black person in a position of ultimate authority (also female for bonus points)
  
• The doctor who is the obligatory homosexual
• Tweedy boy's school teacher becomes Outward Bound hiking instructor
• The selfish trollop becomes, no prizes, the selfish trollop
  
• And, of course, The Others. Sorry, the ones in the sinister Laboratory.
  

All of them belong to the only classes that the BBC recognises: lower middle, professional, under, aggressively ethnic, and political. Unsurprisingly, the only groups not represented are the working, middle, upper middle, and upper classes that in New Labour Britain are utterly invisible–unless they're victims and villains, of course, and then only rarely.

This isn't so much Survivors as Lost with a Survivors' twist. The characters aren't characters from whom plots grow organically. They're not even plausible. I could believe George Baker's trade unionist as the would-be dictator in the original, but an undersecretary of media relations or whatever she was as the 21st century Cromwell? Pull the other one. They're a collection of quirks and traits to hang soap opera complications on. And where the original was a tragedy of losing a comfortable old world that morphs into the adventure of building a new world, this is the destruction of a degenerate and unpleasant world that morphs into the pointless meanderings of a load of emotional cripples.

The original made the audience pine for what was lost while making them curious with what sort of world is to come and it did so with great economy. It also provided us with characters who are believable and for whom we can develop sympathies. In the remake, we have a slow, turgid exploration of characters who aren't worth the effort. They are shallow, stereotypical, overacted, emotionally incontinent, overacted, pointlessly motivated, overacted, self-centred, overacted, humourless, overacted, and overacted. The new version pretends to have mysteries and dilemmas, but the mysteries turn out to be conundrums that once revealed fail to move the plot forward one iota and dilemmas that are nothing but a means for the producers to stave off the inevitable moment when the audience realises that the story is going absolutely nowhere. If there is any premise to this series, it is not about the fragility of civilisation, but rather a Minitruth warning to the inmates of the nanny state about how horrible it would be if The Party that is mother and father to them went away.

In other words, there wasn't anything worth watching on the telly.

The upshot of all this is that St. Valentine's Day is just too complicated to become romantic on command, so we're going to have our own SVD when the mood strikes us.

Let's just hope it isn't in the produce section again down the Safeway. Last time the magistrate didn't have much of a sense of humour about it.