Sedentary Gentleman's Fictional Heroes

WE CAN’T BE HEROES

Sedentary Gentleman has often been criticised for making his fictional protagonists too ‘unsympathetic’.

The subject of this blog

So Sedentary Gentleman, having read a blog is best optimised for marketing purposes when containing lists of top tens to engage potential customers, thought he would let you in on some of his ‘heroes’. 

We can't be this

FLASHMAN

Undoubtedly the finest literary creation in all, um, literature. In one story he gets one over on ‘The Master Detective himself’.

I don’t know what made Sedentary Gentleman laugh more: the fact Flashman gets yet another undeserved victory, or the spluttering response of a Holmes worshipping friend when I told her. For my friend, Holmes could never be beaten. It simply couldn’t happen. But Flashman does it.

A coward and a bully

Flashman-ophiles always relish the moments when our man threatens to become too heroic and manages some hideous feat of craven cowardice resulting in the misfortune and often death of a much more noble colleague. The genius of Flashman is, of course, his humanity in the face of horror, stupidity and ridiculous Victorian morality. 

Sedentary Gentleman recalls clearly, back in the late 1970s, reading the blurb in the back of a paperback about the adventures of the school bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He thought it the most brilliant idea ever. That a coward, a bully and a knave could ‘star’ in a book was almost beyond belief – after a short lifetime of ‘good’ heroes, this was such a daring conceit.

Although obviously Sedentary Gentleman hasn’t read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, there is an odd childhood memory of a BBC version – of a young boy being ‘roasted’ over a flame by this character ‘Flashman’ and his bully boy chums. Those blurry early TV flames, the knots tying the boy (presumably Tom Brown) to a metal fire guard, the bullies laughing and taunting; feeling the horror and despair of the victim... Let’s leave it there, eh.

Flashman definitely got me away from the whitebread heroes and pulp plots of James Herbert and King and that. I realised a character could hold a book; that you could have unreliable narrators. You didn’t have to like them; you didn’t want to be them but you could only empathise with them. And more importantly, one didn’t have to ‘resort to the supernatural’. The real world was sufficient from then on; more than enough. And that includes JG Ballard himself – the eponymous ‘hero’ of that comically perverse novel ‘Crash’.

ASH

Out of the Evil Dead. Check out Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness commentary. How he believes the film drops dead (no pun intended) when Ash turns out to be a straight up hero after all. The final shot of Evil Dead 2 is up there with ‘Waiting for Godot’ as a master class in ennui, empathy and existentialism. Yes, Sedentary Gentleman did write that last sentence.

Ennui, empathy and existentialism. With monsters.

Selfish note: as a student, Sedentary Gentleman seriously considered getting himself a tattoo of Ash in the final image of Evil Dead 2. What a wanker. Even worse, he also considered as a teenager a tattoo of Wile E. Coyote – so deeply did he identify with this unlovely creature whose every attempt to succeed was met with spectacular and painful failure. This was in the 1980s, before it was understood tattoos became de rigeur for so many people. So getting old has its benefits.

Sedentary Gentleman, not a fan of this classy art form. His loss

Although Ash is actually a real hero, he is only interesting when he is unheroic; when he is you or I. Army of Darkness was strangely more but less. You gets me?

DUNBAR

The small number of people in the world who can still read would usually cite Yossarian as the hero of Catch 22 but for me it was always Dunbar. An American officer who spends his time practising archery; not because he loves this hobby but because he hates it. Time drags when Dunbar so he feels like he lives longer.

Dunbar’s eventual fate is wonderful; so unbelievably fantastic it will come as a huge disappointment when you read it.

SOMETHING HAPPENED

Our un-named narrator is the greatest, most honest fictional character in all literature. Oh, I said that before. I’ll stick to this being Sedentary Gentleman’s favourite, most psyche-damaging book.

CLAUDIUS

Finally, we have I, Claudius. A book of pure pleasure. Never copied; never bettered. Even the magnificent TV series does not capture the full glory of Caligula and his unfortunately too brief reign. Sedentary Gentleman’s colleague – the same as before – felt bad reading it. The reader is greedy for plot, wants more atrocities, more madness, more callousness. It brings out the worst in us...

What else do you need? Except the 2000AD Judge Dredd story ‘Judge Cal’ which brilliantly and comically reset the Caligula story in Mega-City 1.

TONY COCKSURE AND KTEL BREVELL

Oh, and a brief plug on behalf of the Sedentary Gentleman: his film DISCO – currently in development with Future Sun Films, has many parallels with the decadent Roman Empire. Set in a fictional London of 1978. You could say it’s a pulp rehash of the Anthony and Cleopatra story. Itself a delightful study of two utterly loathsome human beings.

The Theatre proves once again nothing can compare with the live experience

Anyway, Sedentary Gentleman needs his cocoa. There is no real aim for this blog but a few pleasant moments reliving fine books. He doesn’t ask you to like him; empathy is more than enough.

The lesser film version

Laugh About it Now

ELECTRIC DREAMS - NOTES FROM A SURVIVOR

A surprisingly non-ironic blog. Something personal and painful. Enjoy!

PART ONE

We were that desperate.

This surely is the only possible explanation as to why I would even consider the possibility that I might train to become an electrician. Or, as the outcome was more specifically sold to me: a Domestic Installer.

I should have known it wouldn’t work out. Plenty of other people were telling me. I just didn’t listen; I couldn’t. There was no other option.

2009 was just beginning. 2008 was washed up and gone. Somehow I found myself, and my wife and our twin boys not even at their second birthday, living in Worthing in West Sussex. There were no jobs. No jobs that paid any money, at least. And seemingly no jobs that didn’t.

I will confess now that I’ve always been pretty bad at jobs. I had already retrained twice and both of those ideas had fallen to pieces due to my lack of enthusiasm and any form of entrepreneurial flair. Every evening the television was filled with highly motivated individuals elbowing each other through the market place to make their name as property developers or chocolate factory owners or SEO consultants.

This was clearly what one had to do now; in lieu of an actual job, you invented one. With my ability to be drained of confidence and enthusiasm even in tasks I do like, having to dredge up these qualities for non-existent jobs I didn’t was always going to be an uphill struggle.

Add to this a complete lack of confidence and ability in any physical task; you can see why electricianing had never been a career choice.

And talking of enough. Enough was enough. I was a year into being a father. I hadn’t slept properly in all that time. I had moved out of the capital to this backwater retirement town I’d never even visited until I moved to it. My ‘career’ had ended when both my agents – neither of whom had ever made any money out of me – dumped me in the same week. My life consisted of taking babies to playgroups and being glowered at by tattooed teenage mums. I didn’t know anyone, never went out; had no money and no social life.

I was done with embarrassment and humiliation and poverty. Enough was enough.

Everyone said that the people in short supply were plumbers and electricians. Now, I don’t mind theoretical science but plumbing appeared to involve difficult physical work involving pipes and water systems. A lot of manual labour. Electricity on the other hand was about wires and maths. Surely, I could master that stuff. Also, I was often told the manual stuff would come. One just had to practice enough.

I suppose there was a vision of a future in which I made a couple of hundred a day moving sockets and sorting out fuse boxes in the houses of friends and old people. Not proper electricianing and that: I mean, even I couldn’t dream up the notion I would be repairing hospital generators or pylons, but a little bit of domestic installing between auditions and Doctor Who book writing seemed not impossible.

THE SALESMAN

‘Do you have any manual skills?’ asked the grinning salesman in my front room. He was too clichéd – pressed suit, armful of laptops and folders, silver bracelet and watch combination. ‘Are you practical at home; get on with the little jobs?’

My wife looked at me. Was this time for honesty? I couldn’t tell.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any skills like that.’

‘Perfect,’ said the Salesman. ‘That’s exactly the type of people this new Domestic Installer qualification is designed for. You won’t be bogged down with the old fashioned regulations and ways of working. We’ll teach you how to do those things. Now, do you want the course in Southampton or London?’

‘London.’

‘Great. How would you pay?’

How would we pay? What, the small matter of two and a half thousand pounds to become a Domestic Installer? Don’t ask. But it didn’t matter because after a few old people’s houses and jobs at mate’s rates, I’d quickly pay that off. I’d be working within a year.

We shook hands, the salesman and I. He actually had the nerve to shake my hand.

WHAT IS ELECTRICITY?

The first thing about electricity: I didn’t know what it actually is. A force? A power? How does it make lights work? Ovens? Why does it shock you?

A friend of mine, a practical friend, told me to think of electricity as water and the wires as pipes. This helped. But not really. How do real electricians define this raw thing they work with every day?

However, for the purposes of this course did it actually matter what electricity was? I mean, I have a degree. Surely I could get my head round the theoretical grounding behind this all-powerful force in our lives.

Except I couldn’t. Maybe I was tired but I just could not grasp the concept of electricity. You look it up. Even Wikipedia uses the old Star Wars getout (as in the infamous Return of the Jedi Obi-Wan lie to Luke). Wikipedia states what electricity is depends on what kind of ‘electricity’ you’re talking about.

Thanks. I don’t know what kind of electricity I’m talking about. That’s why I’m – oh never mind.

I didn’t know any electricians at that point so I couldn’t ask them. I kept at bay the advice of the pre-course literature that suggested knowing electricians would be helpful. Truth is: I’m scared of electricians. As I’m scared of any reasonable practical male able to do proper things with their hands.

Call me foolish, but I presumed when the course literature arrived that Part One Section One would consist of a definition of electricity and the general method by which humanity had discovered and mastered this mighty power.

This did not seem to be the case. In fact, Part One of the three inscrutable ring binders was dedicated to something called Part P. This is a certificate about the health and safety aspect of working with electricity in domestic situations like, you know, when you install a boiler.

Littered with jargon, this folder appeared to imply quite a great deal of familiarity with actually already being an electrician. Even more confusing, the rest of the folder seemed to talk a lot about the Electrical Regulations 17^th Edition. What?

None of the ring binders provided any information on what an electrician did.

The student – me – was expected to complete written courses in all three folders, on my own, and send them off for marking. Once I had passed, I was expected to book a date for the week long practical course in London which would be sufficient for me to begin work in my new profession.

I passed the written course. I had to. Two and a half thousand pounds of other people’s money had been invested.  I passed by rote learning every single piece of information in the Electrician’s Handbook. This was one of the hardest, most boring thing I have ever done in my life.

Because I had merely memorized paragraphs I did not understand, as soon as I passed I forgot everything. 

Didn’t matter: I was through to the next stage.

IN PART TWO: 

LEARN HOW A FORTY YEAR OLD MAN CAN BE SO HUMILIATED HE CAN CRY.