2023 and STUFF. Bit Late. Sorry.

 People are posting their best of lists for 2023. Y'all be reading new books, watching all the new films that came out, you've got the long lists of must-see-TV you enjoyed, and all those albums you bought on warm, reassuringly expensive vinyl. The feng shui in your houses must be like the low hum of an unhappy fridge. Bet you never throw out a newspaper either. I'm impressed by your mental acuity, your disposable income, your time-rich lifestyles. 

I've got none of that going on. Have I read a new book this year? Have I bought a record? Have I seen a film? Generally, I play music I already own, read the books in my extensive library. Watch the DVDs I've been collecting for decades. I prefer this. I have relationships with these things. I'm not breathlessly chasing down the latest thing with butterflies in my belly, as I approach the strange, the new, the sexily undiscovered. I revisit. I live with. And as I change, my books, my films, my records change too. They mean different things across the decades, and most of them have been with me that long. They furnish my life. They nurture and inform me. I am an old man surrounded by my stuff. 

Nevertheless, almost by accident, I discover new things. I can't help it.  So here are the things that were new to me this year and are, by default, the best things of 2023. I mean, I feel like default sounds a bit unkind. I liked them. They were good. I don't encounter much shit art. I'm choosy. 

Film of the Year: Poor Things. 

My film of the year, really, was called Muirgen, and I wrote and directed it. People seemed to like it. It was moody and mysterious and crisply photographed. The music was very good. But it's probably poor form to claim your own work as the best of the year. You'd be like one of those people who select their own records for Desert Island Discs (I'm looking at you Dame Moura Lympany). And with the best will in the world, it could be said that Poor Things, a stylish, lyrical Frankenstein variant, chock full of surrealist filigree, is slightly better than my film. That's not false modesty. I really think it nudges it. No, you're too kind.  

You should be thankful for films like this. How something so specific, so full of personality and obsession got through the studio system is a miracle. Oh, and Emma Stone is FANTASTIC. 

Album of the Year: Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs present Paris in the Spring. 

Once again, I have skin in the game, as the mighty Ebbing House - my band - released their third E.P. "Not Really Now Not Any More", a blistering collection we really shouldn't have had the energy to write and perform. Seriously. The band has a combined age of over 307, and there's only two of us. 

Paris in the Spring, an album that was not released this year and contains no music recorded in my lifetime, was, crucially, purchased by me in the last twelve months. So it counts. I've enjoyed a lot of the St Etienne crate-dredger's work in the past, but I think this is their absolute best. Every song on this 23 track compilation is extraordinary. There are no duds here, but particular favourites include L'Elu by Ilous & Decuyper, Les Adventures Extraordinaires D'Un Billet De Banque by Bernard Lavilliers and the infinite sadness of France Gall's Chanson Pour Que Tu M'Aimes Un Peu ("Song That You Might Like Me A Bit More" I'm welling up again) It's beautifully put together, their liner notes are charming and informative and it beautifully sequenced. And to think I put off buying it because I already had three of the songs on it. I think it may be the best compilation album ever created. In your face, Abba Gold.  

Book of the Year: My Life of Crime by Tyler C Gore. 

I do read books. Still. I read less fiction than I used to - the malaise of the middle-aged autodidact. I woke up one morning and realised I knew nothing about anything and had no idea how it all joined up. People ask me why I read, and I tell them I read to forget. 

This isn't really fiction either, they're personal essays. This stuff happened, and the person it happened to is Tyler C Gore. But it reads like fiction. It is told. 

I loved this book. There is a magnificent sweep of detail here: Gore's obsessions and irritability, his disinclination to do what he's told even in his own best interest. We get local politics, the horrors of the American healthcare system and the prophylactic bubble that protects him as he negotiates it, as his wife is a big cheese in the Hospital. We get a feeling for the teeming city he calls home and the naked-and-afraid body horror of being contained inside a monstrous institution in a powerless state. We get all this and we get Gore's comic voice: wry, irascible, opinionated and pedantic, but shot through with love for his wife and his cat and, occasionally, a really nice pebble. 

TV Show of the Year: The Intruder. 

Yeah, you haven't seen it. It was made in 1974 for Granada television by Peter Plummer who had previously made The Owl Service, and certain tropes carry over: children are played by adults, an older character baffles and confounds. There's an icy and distant matriarch (in The Owl Service she's so unreachable she doesn't even appear on camera). There's a gorgeous credit sequence and an outrageously sexy turn by the female lead. 

The plot sees 16 year old "sand-pilot" Arnold Haithwaite (played by 25 year old James Bate) shaken by the arrival of a middle-aged man in a raincoat, eye-patch and beret - a nightmare, low-rent fusion of Frank Spencer and Halloween Jack - played by the fish-belly white Milton Johns, with lip-smacking relish. The man calls himself "Sonny",  but later reveals his real name is also Arnold Haithwaite, claiming to be the nephew of Arnold's enfeebled guardian. What follows is a struggle both physical and metaphysical for Arnold's identity.

Arnold is aided by two posh Southern children, Jane and Peter. Jane is 17 and played by the 27 year old Sheila Ruskin in a variety of shiny bikinis. Peter is Simon Fisher Turner, soon to work with Derek Jarman and Michael Winner and release records as The King of Luxembourg. 

This is pretty strong meat. It contains a lot of large, theatrical acting in confined spaces. Voices are raised, spittle is flecked. Rooms are shabby. It is a symphony of browns and greys, the slurry-sea stinking up the horizon, the land corroded, over-looked. Sonny's plan is to turn the town into a Marina. It's a ludicrous scheme, his drawings of white, stucco buildings and vibrant blue seas at odds with bleakness of the landscape, where dirt meets wet, where everything looks shit. The buildings. The interiors. The clothes. The rooms are tiny, and the characters shot from beneath. Picture rails loom out of each frame. Cobwebs cling to the shadows. 

The action is interminable and confusing. The story is...well, things happen, in some sort order, but would you call it a story? A man turns up, claims to have the same name as a boy and moves into his house. He wants to build a Marina and cuts down a tree. Then he drowns. The boy and the girl have a sort of prickly, doomed relationship, and also nearly drown but don't. Then he decides he's better off with a girl of his own class. Okay. I think she learns a valuable lesson or something. 

She also - uniquely for a children's show, shown on Sunday at tea time - gets a topless scene. Its definitively gratuitous - it actually takes you out of the show. But it was the early 70's, so...I dunno. Is it art? Some of this must definitely be art, it's so demented. There's so much shouting. 

On the Bluray there's a commentary over the episode with the topless scene, where the bloke talking about it has two conflicting trains of thought. On the one hand, he is desperate for you to tell everyone about The Intruder, as if enough people like it he may get to do more releases of similar programmes. Equally, he is bending over backwards to tell us that the nude scene is utterly inappropriate, shouldn't have been allowed, he does not approve, and "would not recommend". Make your mind up, mate. Am I supposed to recommending The Intruder, with the caveat that it's immoral, and I strongly recommend you don't watch it? 

Fine. The Intruder is a really strange, peculiarly positioned children's TV curio. Would not recommend. 

Play of the Year: The Beauty Queen of Leenane

It's a sit-com. Two trapped characters in a ruinous crater tearing strips off each, a dysfunctional family romance, love and hate confused, spliced, plaited together. It's "Steptoe and Daughter". But it's a sit-com written by McDonagh, so it goes deeper, darker, and uglier. We're into sit-trag territory. 

The story is deceptively simple, but plot-strands are so neatly buried in the text that nothing feels contrived. It works beautifully. The anticipation of horrors to come are as much a part of the show as the call-backs or the subtle shades of character. 

Nicky Harley as Maureen, is the fulcrum the story revolves around. Her performance is extraordinary. She shows us so many Maureens: the down-trodden defeated drudge with the sharp tongue, the local oddball in the bad clothes, the newly awakened sensual paramour, the dull-eyed avenging angel, the confused and flustered fantasist. She inhabits them all in dizzying succession. This seems like a breakaway role, a tremendous showcase for her talents. 

This production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane is beautifully acted and directed, handsomely staged, and with a story and performances that stay with you long after you shuffle out of the theatre, back to the sit-trag of your own life. 

Pop Song of the Year: As It Was - Harry Styles

"Come on, Harry, we want to say good night to you."

I first heard this in a taxi in Cornwall, and I was confused. It sounds old. It's an 80's record. The staccato keys, the propulsion, the infinite sadness of the minor chord progression. Simultaneously it sounds like something Coldplay would do nowadays. The voice is blurred, buttery, melting onto the music. There are chimes and a synth riff that Mags from Aha would deffo raise an eyebrow at. I can see him do it. Mags is by far the most affable member of Aha. 

That riff stayed in my head for days. Weeks. That imploring, lighter-than-air vocal, short burps of communication. I assumed it was some new band aping the sort of pop music I grew up on. Then I found out it was Harry Styles. From One Direction. Who appeared in that mid credits sting in The Eternals (yeah, they're not following that up, Harry). Harry Styles from that 1950s set Sci-fi film everyone was disappointed by. I knew nothing about Harry Styles. Now I know one thing. 

I like this sad song about the sad pop star being sad. It's his Stardust. 

Hero of the Year: A Girl on a Rock. 

I was walking up a beach in Cornwall, while a boy and a girl strolled down it. They were accompanied by two large, black dogs and one, large white towel. The couple were, perhaps, in their early twenties. She was blonde, he had dark hair. If you were attempting to advertise a beach, or a new kitchen, or a Toyota Yaris or just about anything really, this would be the couple you'd choose. When she stripped to her bikini you could add Bodyform and 90s hip hop to that list. They were a good looking pair. 

There was a large rock poking out of the sea. It looked like granite from the way it was broken up into sharp shelves, and was shark's fin grey. The girl walked into the sea and towards the rock and pulled herself onto it. She found a handhold, then a foothold, and she was up, climbing up its ridges as easily as a spiral staircase, and she was at the top, strolling about the jagged summit in bare feet, thirty feet above the water. 

The wind was up, the breakers crashing. She's mad, I thought. To injury-averse people like myself, who have lost teeth to cheese souffles and broken their knees falling down three carpeted steps carrying a box of aluminium stair-rods, to clamber up a giant granite rock, nearly naked, and wander about like it was your hotel balcony, is reckless beyond belief. I was in awe of her. 

Without warning, and quite casually, she back-flipped off the rock and plunged into a shallow pool. She disappeared. There was barely a splash. Fucking hell. The pool was circled by jagged rocks. The seabed was solid rock beyond the skirt of shingle. Fucking hell. 

She reappeared, after an improbably lengthy period of time, seal sleek and not bleeding from the head, and striding up the beach like Botticelli's Venus, minus the big clam. She looked primordial, mythical. She'd done the bravest thing I'd ever seen anyone do, and for no reason. She did it because she could, and because she'd look amazing doing it. It was like something from a film, but a film in which I wouldn't be the protagonist, or the comic relief or even credited at all, unless it was something like "Fat Wet Beach Man With His Mouth Open". The story was elsewhere. The story was all her. As she swam in the sea with her two black dogs, I could see she'd be the star of her own great adventure. And as her boyfriend sat on a towel on the beach, I could tell he'd be written out after the first season.      

Later on we returned to the beach and the tide had gone out. We could see the rock, taller now, and the pool she'd jumped into was ringed by a spiky, stone crown. The jump was even more dangerous than it had appeared. Susan pointed out the girl was probably local and might have been jumping from that rock for years, perhaps since she was a child. And I thought back to my own childhood, and my dad trying to teach me to swim in the municipal pool, and how I'd clung onto him like a spider monkey, screaming, refusing to put my head under the water and how, eventually, he'd given up, and I'd never learned to swim well, though I loved swimming now. I knew I didn't have it in me to leap from that rock. Even before all the damage, before the shattered limbs, I just wasn't brave. It wasn't in me. 

 And I'd never looked that good in a bikini.