More PKD on the Radio...

To elaborate on that previous post (which, truth be told, I knocked out in a bit of a rush):

The Today programme's Jim Naughtie was talking to David Davis (ex-shadow home secretary) and Derek Barnett (vice president of the Police Superintendents' Association of England & Wales) about calls for a debate about how police should handle public protests in the future. The conversation moved on to the recent arrest (and subsequent release on bail) of 114 people in Nottingham who were apparently planning to stage a big-ass protest at a power station.

The bit that made my ears do a double-take was when Davis said:

"We are getting into... a sort of pre-crime mentality. The idea that we've got to somehow interview people before the crime takes place."

Which is all a bit disturbing, at least to a simple fool with leftish, anti-authoritarian tendencies like me. What made it worse was the fact that this was the first time I'd heard the term 'pre-crime' outside of a Phillip K. Dick science fiction novel. What next? Robert Peston reviewing the latest figures from Ubik Industires? John Humphreys grilling Palmer Eldritch over his three stigmata?

But I digress. As far as I know, the term 'pre-crime' first appeared in PKD's 1958 short story 'The Minority Report' (which Steven Spielberg turned into a Cruiser-starring blockbuster in 2002). In the story, the police arrest people for crimes that they would have committed before they're actually committed. Like so many of PKD's stories, the central conceit is fiendishly smart and deliciously bonkers. I like it a lot.

I'm just not quite ready to see it happen for real.


You can find the original Today programme interview here (it's about 7 minutes in)

Philip K. David Davis

Former shadow home secretary David Davis was just on Radio 4's Today programme. He was discussing the role of police crowd control following the G20 demonstrations. He said that policing in this country is in danger of becoming increasingly 'pre-crime' based.

David Davis a PKD fan? Who'd a thought it...

I found a pair of old Docs...

I watched a couple of vintage documentaries about two of my favourite writers on Ye Olde Interwebs this week that I haven't seen for bloody years. I guess it says a lot about my particular strain of temperament that [a] I can get genuinely excited about watching vintage documentaries I haven't seen in bloody years and, [b] I never previously thought of checking the likes of YouTube or GoogleVideo for hot-damn, good-shit examples of the aforementioned [a] that I didn't bother videotaping when they were first broadcast. Proof if proof were needed, then, that I'm still an analogue man living in a digital world.

Anyhow, the first was an BBC Arena doc from 1994 about SF author Philip K Dick called A Day in the Afterlife. I was 23 when I last saw it and, until then, the only PKD book I'd read was Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep in my capacity as a dutiful fan of the film Blade Runner. After watching the doc, I greedily devoured every PKD book I could lay my badly-manicured mitts on.

This is it:



Worth watching for the fake, Ubik-style PKD commercials presented by two of my heroes, fellow PKD fans Terry Gilliam & Elvis Costello.

The other vintage doc I revisited this week was brought to my attention that sage of online omniscience, Gentleman Pete Ashton. Called Monsters, Maniacs and Moore it's about the Bard of Northampton himself, comics writer extraordinaire Alan Moore [who, as Pop Will Eat Itself once astutely observed, "Knows the score"]. The last time I saw this one was when it was first broadcast in 1987. I was even younger then.

Unlike the PKD doc, this didn't turn me onto the works of the Bearded One: it was more a case of preaching to the converted. Watching it now, two decades later, reminds me of how exciting comics were back then. This was the period of Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns - of Barefoot Gen and Maus - when even Marvel Comics were publishing English language editions of Moebius albums. To put it another way, this was a period when comics seemed to grow up just as I was supposed to be growing out of them.

Part 1 is below [parts 2-4 are here]:



Monsters, Maniacs and Moore was part of an 80s documentary series called England, Their England which was broadcast by what we used to call Central TV. That's right, this brilliant and thoughtful documentary about a staggeringly brilliant writer working in a widely despised medium was broadcast on ITV. Possibly at prime-time.

Times have certainly changed.