o-uncle-newt

[o-uncle-newt]

(Ramble on why I think so below the cut- warning for strong opinions lol:)

I love The Nine Tailors (though it took time to make me love it, I won't lie- I tend to zone out during the change-ringing description bits). But I do not love Hilary Thorpe, I think the parts of the book with her in them are tonally out of place, and I think that the reason why this is true is because she's Sayers's most indulgent/unrepentant expy. I think it's true both on a purely book level, but also in terms of Sayers's actual biography.

First I'll note on a purely book level- Harriet might literally have Wimsey fall in love with her, but she has to go through a lot and change a lot to actually get with him. (Not to change for him, but just to grow somewhat as a person.) Miss Meteyard is probably the most "neutral" major Sayers expy, and possibly the one most true to life, but it's an important element of her place in the story that she doesn't get Wimsey at the end. Hilary though... it's basically a Daddy Long Legs without the creepy bit at the end where he marries her. Yes, her story in the book starts with tragedy, but she literally gets left two fortunes and has the admiration and patronage of a lord, and it's not subtly portrayed. It feels like it was painted in with a very broad and bold brush, unlike so much of the rest of the book which is very subtle in its human emotions and relationships.

She has that element to her which is probably the most indulgent thing for a certain kind of person, who my guess is includes a lot of the people who read Sayers (I'm certainly one of them)- she's a precocious teen and an adult- not just any adult, but a titled and brilliant one- recognizes her precocity and upcoming greatness (even without a whole lot of evidence) and celebrates her for them. There's a common trope in middle grade books of kids who are really talented or precocious in some way and make an impact in the adult world- think Roald Dahl or Andrew Clements, off the top of my head- and another genre, for young women a bit older, where it's specifically that that attention is quasi- (or actually!) romantic but in an unthreatening way that emphasizes both the character's precocity despite her youth and the fact that it's an adult who is older and has made their (usually his) way in the world who recognizes it. Let's say more of a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm than a Daddy Long Legs, then.

To be clear- there is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of plot! Like I said, I loved that kind of thing when I was a kid, and to be honest I like it as an adult too. But usually, these books require the child/young woman in question to have internal development as part of the journey and part of the world building of what makes the character both sympathetic and precocious. The Nine Tailors doesn't really do that- Hilary has to live with great tragedy at the start of the book, but her own development as a person, and honestly our knowledge of her as a person, is relatively limited. She basically is how she is and Wimsey is (semi-paternally) into that because the way she is-precocious and somewhat aloof- is obviously awesome and she also ends up with a gazillion dollars and the emeralds. In terms of how Wimsey reacts to her, she's like mini-Harriet- but Harriet has to work for it somewhat. Not for Wimsey's affection for her, but for the richness of character that makes us care about Wimsey's affection for her.

So anyway, doesn't really work for me, and feels very out of place and garish in an otherwise intricately-painted book IMO. But also, I think it becomes even more blatant when you read about Cat O'Mary and Sayers's unfinished memoir.

So basically, sometime in the early 30s Sayers started writing a memoir, which she called My Edwardian Childhood. The funny part is she never made it to the actual Edwardian period- it only took her to about age five, when Victoria was still on the throne- but (though I've never read it- I do want to get my hands on it) it ends up being an account of her early years in Oxford and then the move to the fens, which she saw in retrospect as cutting her off from intelligent society in a way which stunted her. Having made it up to that move to East Anglia, she got so into the overall vibe of the location that she decided to put the memoir aside and work on a labor of love dedicated to this atmosphere of her upbringing- The Nine Tailors.

So, basically, Sayers got the idea for this book while doing some deep musings about her own childhood in that area, and while she was starting to critically think about what she was like as a child. We know that Sayers used real names of people from her childhood for the character names in The Nine Tailors, and it's said that Venables is based on her father. Why would it be a surprise that Hilary Thorpe might be based on her?

Once Sayers was done with The Nine Tailors, she started a totally different book- a semi-autobiographical novel, unrelated to the Wimsey novels, called Cat O'Mary. The main character, based on herself, was named Katherine rather than Dorothy, but her letters as well as biographical details match up enough for us to know that the account of her childhood is VERY aligned with what it was actually like for her. And, in fact, she goes into a lot of detail about what she was like- but with a much more critical eye on herself than she had in her memoir. She talks about having "developed all the faults and peculiarities of an only child whose entire life is spent among grown-up people. She was self-absorbed, egotistical, timid, priggish and, in a mild sort of way, disobedient." And honestly, even when you read a biography of her, or her collected letters from her childhood, that is something of the image of her as a young, precocious, coddled child that one gets (she was the only daughter of a minister who grew up very insulated and as the center of attention, playing only with children "imported" for her, more or less). Sayers never finished Cat O'Mary, and it's not 100% clear why- but it's hypothesized that it's because the overall point of the book in her mind was to convey the message that, by then, she'd already decided to include in Gaudy Night (through the eyes of another expy lol).

I feel a bit as though Hilary Thorpe is Sayers as she'd have written of herself in that more idealized memoir of hers- with perhaps a tad more wish fulfilment than she'd have given herself in that, but then again isn't that was Wimsey is for? And I wonder whether it's only after writing this ideal and beloved version of herself as a child, with the nostalgia that came from writing about the place she grew up in and in the frame of mind that led to her memoir, that she buckled down to actually engage with what that kind of precocious child who she was might have actually been like, how she really was/would have been accepted by adults, etc. With all the real life parallels between Hilary's personality and Sayers's, and the contrast between the somewhat twee idealization of Hilary and the more acerbic (and AFAIK more accurate to Sayers IRL, who was by many accounts a tough cookie, including from people who said it positively) portrayal of Katherine, it can be hard for me to really enjoy Hilary without a healthy dose of eye-rolling.

But like, the rest of the book is awesome so who cares?

[o-uncle-newt]

It's a good question! I'd initially considered starting it with Strong Poison but from the POV of the Cattery (and actually I do wonder if maybe that's a good pilot episode), but I never did consider going back as far as Unnatural Death because my conception of the hypothetical show never included showing the creation of the Cattery. After all, in UD Miss Climpson is the only operative- starting there would mean needing to show how it develops from just her in an upper floor flat to a whole team in office space.

It's possible that that could be accomplished in a 1-1.5 hour season opener, or that a season could be devoted to showing the recruitment of people over time, but it didn't really seem worth it to me. As I mentioned, my model for this show is something like Call the Midwife, where we as viewers, through a proxy newbie, get dunked right into the action. It seemed to me to make sense for a show of the kind I was envisioning to have a stable cast and premise from the outset, especially as, like in Call the Midwife, I'd want the Cattery office itself to be a setting rather than just have each episode be operatives going off and doing jobs in different places.

But if you or someone else has a vision for this that starts earlier, please do share it!

OK I've talked here, I think, about my strong belief that we need a Miss Climpson's Cattery TV show to jump on the mystery period drama bandwagon- and I've been thinking about what it might look like and have some ideas

Please feel free to add some in comments or reblogs!

The overall cast structure is basically like Call the Midwife S1 (or, more accurately, S2-3)- we have a POV "new to the crew" character who is purportedly the main character (but significantly lower-drama than Jenny lol) but it's functionally an ensemble. Miss Climpson is the Sister Julienne character, aka the on-the-ground boss, and then there are a bunch of other operatives, who all show up at SOME point in most episodes but only a few of them take center stage each episode in a particular case or two. There are also the support staff/actual typists, who are fun side characters.

Wimsey is a side character, and is played by a non-super-famous actor. He only appears in a few episodes at most in each season, usually as someone who is giving work to the operatives. While he can bring in operatives to help him on his cases, he is never allowed to solve any agency cases.

Harriet is a one or two episode max character. She meets Miss Climpson and possibly Miss Murchison but nobody else (as discussed in Gaudy Night). Honestly, if they don't show her that's fine too. At most she's brought in to provide help/insight on a literary world case.

The show starts right after the events of Strong Poison, and it's discussed as a recent case among the team. That said, unless it can be fit canonically into a Sayers story without undue bother, the episodes do NOT circle around existing Sayers plots.

Miss Murchison is a significant character, and has a love interest to whom she gets married sometime toward the third/fourth year of show canon (as we know that canonically she gets married sometime before the events of Gaudy Night). It is a cute older-nerd romance and everyone ships it. There is no "drama," just sweetness.

This is optional, but it is POSSIBLE that Wimsey brings Miss Meteyard into the firm, likely not permanently but possibly on a one-case basis for her advertising world expertise. She is initially snobbish about it but soon grows out of it.

As I've alluded to above, the main rule is- Sayers canon can never be violated. There is SO much space for great story and characterization that falls totally in line.

Everything else... is totally up to whoever! And I'm absolutely up for other ideas! These are just the main things I've thought of and I may come back and make additions/edits but here we go for now.

Though... casting idea- I'm not usually very good at this but I really feel like, speaking of Call the Midwife, Georgie Glen (Miss Higgins) could be an interesting Miss Climpson. Quite different than the excellent one in the Petherbridge/Walter adaptation of Strong Poison, but still good. I'm completely open to other suggestions though, as well as casting suggestions for other characters (including just actors who you think would be good for random currently-nonexistent/hypothesized ones- it's just so open ended, there are so many choices!).

[o-uncle-newt]

Posted my first new fic in months!!

...and yes it's a Wimsey fic!

Or rather, the first chapter/episode- the Netflix true crime documentary of Strong Poison is coming out.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63168448

[o-uncle-newt]

Okay, just rewatched dinnerladies and while I stand by some of my criticism, I do have to say that once you get used to some of the shtick it can be absolutely HILARIOUS, and Julie Walters is brilliant even as her character is over the top awful. Everyone is brilliant, really, at bringing out the full potential from Wood's very dense and demanding scripts.

But also, I realized that I never really talked about the character work. I'll admit that I think some of the elements of the heartwarming turn in S2 are a bit over the top (having Bren be brought a whole brass band from Yorkshire in a snowstorm in one episode and a mysterious baby on the fire escape in the next episode is kind of a lot)- and learning that a) Wood deliberately wrote the second season as the last from the beginning and b) she did it after seeing reactions to S1 makes a lot of sense because it does kind of feel like she was like "they liked the heartwarming bits of S1? Let's dump the whole truck in in S2 and see how they like THAT!"

But regardless of this, she had a lot of integrity IMO in how she had the individual characters behave and react to events and to each other (with one exception that I'll say below), and I feel like that's a core lesson that JF took away from it for Cabin Pressure- you can throw any kind of over the top situation at your characters as long as you keep their emotional reactions to it genuine. You have to KNOW them and the trajectory you want for them in order to make everything they do feel real and natural. That doesn't mean making them predictable- it means that if Bren is going to be faced with an ask from Petula, whether she says yes or no, we have to come in knowing that her instinct is to say yes and saying no is a deliberate choice/an achievement, so whichever direction she goes in needs to fall along what we know about her and be justified. A surprising number of sitcoms are surprisingly bad at this.

I'd add another element too- how deftly she hides such revealing moments about character into small moments or lines. Re Bren and Tony's storyline, which can be very sweet even as I feel like I'd find Tony extremely off-putting as a person IRL (but it's a sitcom, so that's an unrealistic standard), I love how much their getting-together arc reveals about Bren as a person. Relatively offhand and as part of moments that are played out as jokes, we find out that Bren has been married for a decade, she hasn't been living with her husband for much of that time, he's a drunk who she was afraid of but she married him because she was worried to say no, and only now is she bothering to get a divorce- because she met Tony and realized that she can get the real thing with someone who may actually love her (and who she loves), which she doesn't consider her first marriage to have been (she says that Tony's been "married before" and is surprised when Tony reminds her that she has been too). It provides background evidence to us of the kind of person who Bren not just is but has already proven herself to be by her action and choices- a people-pleaser who rolls with the punches and takes the good she can get from her life without expecting a whole lot more until someone else makes her realize that she can.

In the Cabin Pressure/dinnerladies influence conversation, I think there's a lot of interesting comparisons, but besides for that ending they're all pretty subtle (no idea if he consciously took the idea of Stan's randomly timed watch saving the day or not for Limerick but I kind of hope he did because it's great). I feel like I can see a bit of Bren and Tony in Carolyn and Herc, which is great because in personality they're absolutely nothing alike- but JF and Wood both get how those character/background bits allow both of those very different yet subtly similar relationships to feel real even when framed by occasionally over the top sitcom shenanigans.

Anyway, still very fun and with great, tight writing/plotting/character work, even if I think Cabin Pressure is overall more my speed tonally. Except that I'd forgotten how much I hate Jean and Stan getting together. I think it's a major exception to the whole "make it fit with their characters" thing because it didn't ring true to me at all. Maybe others disagree but I couldn't make it make sense.

Finished dinnerladies and while I knew that JF had mentioned being a fan of Victoria Wood before, making it to the finale made it VERY clear how much of one lol

(I think overall Cabin Pressure did that ending better than dinnerladies, for what it's worth.)

While the actual comedy of JF vs Wood is clearly very different in terms of the kinds of jokes (to his credit, he doesn't assume that mentioning sex or pelvic floors is an automatic laugh), he definitely does sometimes borrow from her REALLY well done absurdist yet human style of dialogue and conversation in ways that are always fun. And even more significantly, she is clearly so focused on story and dialogue construction and he takes a leaf out of her book in that regard (and I think generally exceeds her in that way, particularly in Cabin Pressure).

I think the emotional beats in dinnerladies could be a bit hit or miss tonally for me (which annoys me because I WANTED to like them more than I did), but when it hit it REALLY hit, and JF clearly gets that too- he just nails the balance.

Overall, Wood is super talented (and so are the people on her shows), even if I don't completely love her overall style, and it's fun to trace the ways that JF clearly learned from her- and it was even before it got super blatant at the second half of S2.

[o-uncle-newt]

Talboys might be my least favorite thing Sayers ever wrote, and she also once wrote an essay for a Jewish publication about how the Jews missed the opportunity to accept Jesus and that's why everything sucks for them so it's actually quite tough competition.

More fuel to my “Dorothy Sayers was a kinky freak” fire.

[o-uncle-newt]

Dorothy L Sayers books at the Grolier Club

On my lunch break, I wandered over to the Grolier Club, an institution of and for books and bibliophiles conveniently located about 300 yards from my office lobby. I was intrigued by their current exhibition (closing in a week or so): Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books. While I found the concept interesting in itself (a guy working with a team of craftspeople created physical editions of books that currently do not exist), the thing that really drew me was the fact that there was a fuckton of Sayers in there.

In fact, as noted on the case's label, while Sayers is not the only writer with more than one book in the exhibit, she is the only one with more than 2-3 and certainly the only one with a full display case of her own.

All books exhibited assume, in the context of the label, that the book exists. So let's take a look at these totally real books and the backstories they're given and see what we think!* (The alt text contains the label text.)

*Well, what I think, fueled partly by the vague few memories I have from the History of the Book class I took in college... but please let me know what you think as well in comments/reblogs!

First up- two books by our own Lord Peter, both mentioned in Clouds of Witness according to the labels- which as far as I can tell is only kind of true. They're not mentioned in the story text, but in the front matter- the fake Debrett's entry (though The Murderer's Vade-Mecum IS mentioned in-text in Unnatural Death!). As such, we don't actually know anything about their contents or contexts. The incunabula book makes a lot of sense, but I must admit- unless it is based on a Sayers text that has escaped me, I find the description of The Murderer's Vade-Mecum to be a bit much as a descriptive leap.

Another minor quibble- it's unclear, was The Murderer's Vade-Mecum printed for public purchase? It says that it's privately printed like the incunabula book, but implies enough of a circulation that murderers might own it. If it was printed for purchase then you can ignore this next bit, BUT- I'm surprised that Wimsey, as a collector of incunabula, doesn't have his own bookbinder who binds his books in a house style. I'd have expected his privately printed books to look coordinated, if not identical exactly, to allow for harmonious shelf displays.

It's History of Prosody, and it looks exactly as big, scary, and toe-breaking as I expected it to, especially with what I assume are a whole second book's worth of footnotes! Nice job.

The Death in the Pot slipcover looks great... but I'm confused by a few things here. Why is the publication date 1922, when (as mentioned on the label) Death in the Pot was published after the events of Strong Poison, which were in 1930? And where does "MG" come from as the name of her publisher- is it referred to somewhere?

I can't decide what I think about the poison cover. Would Lord Saint-George find this funny if he encountered it? Yeah, sure. Would he have the imagination to dream it up? I don't think so.

Another great looking cover and baffling description. Once again, date is weird (publication date would be 1936, most likely, given that they got married in October and during their engagement Harriet was still writing/doing research). Also, the description of Wilfred is a bit odd but I guess can be congruent with the book rendition... but he's not the detective! Where's good ol' Robert Templeton the untidy dresser?

But I do want to emphasize again, excellent cover. No notes.

Book looks good (though I'd have hoped more for a fancy presentation copy bound by Peter as a gift for Harriet or something), though one thing it gets wrong that the label gets right is that no way would it be titled "Harriet Vane Wimsey." It would be Harriet Vane, Lady Peter Wimsey, or both. The date discrepancy is odd- we know Harriet didn't complete her Le Fanu study during the events of Gaudy Night, and she of course left in a bit of a hurry, so the 40s makes sense, but between the two dates I'd assume the right one is 1947- much more likely that she'd have managed to finish it when the war was over and the kids were older.

This looks awesome, though the font/printing is maybe a bit more modern-looking than I expected (but I'm not super knowledgeable). Tiny quibble- it would be Cantab., not Camb. (just as with Harriet's Le Fanu book it said Oxon.). Such an early date as 1901 is slightly surprising, but I suppose there's no real reason why not...? Separately, interesting that they placed the book be at Duke's Denver- Wimsey doesn't live there! Maybe because that's where he used to take part in change-ringing as a kid?

All in all, a great exhibit (and it had a bunch of other fun books as well, like On the Care of the Pig from PG Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories and a deep-black copy of Memories by DEATH of the Discworld). I think that the worldbuilding around the Sayers books in the labels could possibly have been a bit tighter but quite frankly, merely doing this, and to the high standard that they did when creating the books, and specifically highlighting the vividness of Sayers's world and the worlds within it that she creates (in choosing to specifically spotlight multiple books from Sayers's oeuvre), is already more than we (or at least I) deserve.

Final day of the exhibit is next Saturday- if you're in the NY area, highly recommend!

[o-uncle-newt]

As someone who loves all three of these things* what a great idea for a slideshow!

*I do, however, kind of hate Whose Body? and think that Clouds of Witness or Bellona Club is a better starting point

Two additional connecting things, one of which is self promotional-

For a Holmes/Wimsey connection, check out this post I did about Sayers's impeccable Holmesian credentials and some key contributions she made to Sherlockiana

For J&W/Wimsey, I love recommending this fantastic crossover fic. You honestly don't need to know much about Wimsey besides that he's a detective and a shell-shocked WWI vet who is an Oxford alum; it's set pre-canon. But the author does a fantastic job aping Wodehouse's tone and creating an alternate backstory for Wooster that's really compelling

Since most of my followers are fans of either Holmes or J&W, I decided to make a small presentation to introduce another series which is similar and appealing to fans of both, but has a much smaller fandom!! Hope you guys enjoy <3

[o-uncle-newt]

This is in many ways really true, and absolutely a contrast with the other pairs you mention, but what I find fascinating are the very specific ways in which some divides are still present and how Sayers chooses to delineate them. She's very clear that Wimsey treats both of them like confidants, but Wimsey has a number of moments where he's still very conscious of Bunter's position (such as one point where he stops Bunter from insulting the Duke's intelligence as that would be inappropriate), for example. The thing with Parker is even more interesting, because while one barrier between them is in many ways broken down (I don't know what book you're up to so I won't spoil it), at the same time chronologically he becomes much more aware of Parker's status as a policeman being at odds to a degree with Wimsey's own role, depending on the scenario, and that introduces a degree of chill.

All this to say, I am in AWE of how good Sayers is at characters and their layers!

Parker, Bunter and Wimsey feel very different to the duos I've been reading up to this point!

Holmes and Watson, Raffles and Bunny, Jeeves and Bertie all exist with an invisible barrier between them. Holmes can't express his emotions openly (or at least greatly struggles), Raffles can't either; opting to be weird and pull Bunny in on things without saying why. Between Bertie and Jeeves at least some professionalism is required to be upheld.

But not Wimsey and Parker lmao. I just finished Clouds of Witness and those guys will literally get wasted on Westminster Bridge at 5am. Bunter follows happily with Wimsey's investigations and will sob for him when he almost got eaten by a bog lmao. Wimsey tells Parker funny stories and brain teasers just to see him puzzled or laughing. They are too cute :3

These stories get heavy and serious at times, and I find this more than a welcome relief to those times. I LOVE THEM, SAYERS!! THANK YOU

[o-uncle-newt]

Question- has anyone ever written about Cabin Pressure from the perspective of its depictions of aviation?

I have seen a few people (I think on here!) mention Cabin Pressure getting them into aviation, which is what makes me wonder if any of them- or anyone else- has gone into more detail!

I know that JF used his dad as aviation consultant, and I've seen a few different places where he himself commented on the aviation terminology on his blog, and a podcast interview I heard where he describes the plot/a bunch of dialogue from Qik basically coming from a conversation with his dad about whether a plane of the kind he made GERTI could do an Arctic sightseeing trip. And of course there's the use of CRM* as a plot driver in Ipswich.

*which means something completely different in my field and thus always throws me

So that I have, but I'm curious if anyone has ever done something more specifically about the show from an aviation lens. I ask this because recently, on my long express-train subway commutes, I've been reading a lot of Admiral Cloudberg articles about plane crashes/disasters, and while I expected to know/understand nothing, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the terminology I recognized (even if not necessarily what it MEANT) from the background of Cabin Pressure episodes. So I get why nothing funny happens during takeoff/landing (sterile cockpit rule), what the deal is with maximum takeoff/landing weight, and a few other things that I'm not remembering, partly because I probably still don't totally understand them lol. I'd be really curious to know what some of the more subtle aviation-related angles that I might have missed might be, how the show does aviation-wise overall... just seems like a fun angle.

[o-uncle-newt]

A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.

[o-uncle-newt]

As mentioned previously, I have done the thing! Let's see what I do with it, but in the meanwhile...

(Sayers stuff will PROBABLY stay here but who knows.)

I said I was going to start a Holmes sideblog- here's the closest thing to it!

Too antsy to truly commit to a blog about just one series/writer, but I definitely anticipate a nice chunk of Holmes stuff. Canon, Sherlockiana, some adaptational stuff. Will probably also talk a bit about my journey into the Golden Age. Let's see what happens.

To kick it off- a tiermaker I did of canon stories. All on instinct, did not spend more than two seconds considering each one. I haven't looked at it since I finished it and yet I stand behind it completely.

[o-uncle-newt]

ONE: it creates traditions

Despite not being a Christmas-celebrator myself, I'm really glad that the final episode of this show aired as a Christmas special, because it's equally timely to talk about Molokai.

I wrote extensively about Molokai last year, and my main takeaway is that it celebrates ritual in a way that's really important. And I was thinking about it, and so many of the themes that I elevated in previous posts I've done this year are related to this as well. It's important to how funny the show is, how heartwarming the show is, how good the show is for mental health... so many different things.

I recommend reading the above post for a full breakdown, but what I raised about Molokai was that it's basically about the importance of creating and/or participating in rituals and traditions, things that mark your life and add pizzazz to it. Martin, living a depressing life on his own in an attic, has no reason to like Christmas when it's just another dull day, but enjoys it when he's exposed to and participates in ritual. Arthur, it turns out, creates ritual all the time, whether invoking existing traditions re Christmas or creating rituals around things like Birling Day.

I argue, pushing that further, that CABIN PRESSURE is about creating a kind of comforting ritual, tradition, what have you. Don't get me wrong- the comedy is often sharp and creative, there's story and character development over time... but it's not so much that the shape of the show is familiar as that the expectations are. This is going to be funny, this is going to have interesting people, this is going to let those interesting people be comically nasty to each other but also let them have real relatable emotions, and at the end of the episode GERTI will fly again.

There's also the repetitive element of features like games, particular character mannerisms, etc. One of my favorite sitcoms, the 60s spy spoof Get Smart, was written with the main character, Maxwell Smart (Agent 86) given many catchphrases, and the actor who played him actively encouraged the writers to create more because having those kinds of repetitive and funny elements is a good hook and a comforting element to viewers. They ended up being some of the most iconic parts of the show, not just because the lines are funny but because of the way they're said by Max/Adams and the way the character who says them is written. Plenty of Get Smart fans can be caught saying "missed it by that much" or "sorry about that Chief" or, my favorite that I say all the time, "he should have used his powers for niceness instead of evil."

The characters of Cabin Pressure don't have catchphrases in the same way- or rather, it's limited to things like "brilliant" and "yellow car"- but it contains so many different elements that listeners can count on in an episode. If the whiskey is stolen, obviously Douglas did it and the question (which will be answered creatively) is how. If this is a situation where Douglas can save the day, he will- and if he doesn't, then there will be a satisfying reason why. People won't recognize Martin as captain- and if they do then that's a sign that something is off kilter. JF creates the boundaries of the world that we step into and then plays within and around them in incredibly innovative ways. It's such a good formula for keeping things interesting and comforting.

And here's where I go to praise JF as the creator- because he ended up taking on an interesting form of commitment to create ritual in our own lives, maybe because he saw how much we'd already done it ourselves. Thanks to the show, already as of S4 people were taking traveling lemons to different locations, playing Yellow Car by Arthurian rules... and then, he started posting a variation on Get Dressed Ye Merry Gentlemen every year, and as a decidedly non-Christmas person it's basically the only thing about the holiday that I look forward to. (Incidentally- one of the things that made me want to post about this is my curiosity what he'll do this year when he's no longer on Twitter...)

But the biggest ritual-creating thing he did, of course, is do 26 episodes of Cabin Fever. He posted the episodes on a regular schedule (and warned us in advance when he started spacing them out), he gave us games to try and puzzles to solve, and he gave us something to look forward to that would add some fun and shape to our lives in a time that could be both shapeless and stressful. I myself was still recovering from my very early bout of COVID, isolated in my room, bored and miserable and not at full breathing capacity and still only getting over the feeling that I could have potentially died, when Cabin Fever arrived and gave me something to look forward to. It created ritual, which created meaning, which was one of the most thoughtful things someone could have done for me around then.

So, a tribute to Cabin Pressure, a tribute to the wonderful John Finnemore, a tribute to the idea that we can take our own action and join with others to create ritual that gives us meaning and comfort... and a tribute to all of you who have been doing/following along with Cabin Pressure advent in various forms. This too is a form of ritual, community, and tradition that I look forward to continuing to participate in- as part of a really cool fandom.

In the meanwhile, happy tenth freaking anniversary, Merry Christmas to all the Christmas people, almost-Happy Chanukah to all the (fellow) Chanukah people, and just generally wishing a beautiful year full of things that give your life shape and meaning.

[o-uncle-newt]

TWO: what an incredible cast

Long and shitty day today, so put on St Petersburg (as I often do) to make myself feel better. It obviously worked great, but it also ended up being a really good reminder of what I already planned to write about today, which is- what a FANTASTIC set of actors this show has!

It goes without saying that the main four are perfect. You get Stephanie Cole and Roger Allam mid-excellent careers, you get a rapidly rising Benedict Cumberbatch pre-typecast/when people remembered he could do comedy, and of course you get the multitalented JF. I add the multitalented part here to kind of call back to what I've said in past posts- so much of what makes the show great is that all of the scripts are written beautifully to the voices, but in fact without as perfect a set of voices as this show has where would we be? Each of the actors falls into their characters, makes them their own, and is just absolutely transformative, giving the show an all-important foundation.

(They're also actors with great resumes- like many people I got to Cabin Pressure FROM a particular part of BC's filmography lol*, but Stephanie Cole is great in Waiting for God and Roger Allam... well, he's been good in everything I've seen him in but I think the most important thing to me is that he originated the role of English-language Javert. There is little that is more epic than that.)

(*I will note- while I got here from Sherlock, it's being able to see past his typecasting courtesy of Cabin Pressure, and as a result seeing his range and abilities, that kept me watching other things he was in- Patrick Melrose, for example, was fantastic and you'd never think he was the type to do it from either Sherlock OR Cabin Pressure.)

A lot has been said of how BC broke out halfway through Cabin Pressure but stayed on the show rather than be recast- but in general, I will say that the fact that all the actors came through and gave their all to the show each week, taking advantage of the flexibility of radio to commit to being there the full run of the show, is honestly a gift. Radio shows do recast voices (as we know from Newcastle), and one has to live with it, but it would just be a different show if any of them had been permanently recast. To us, those voices and vocal mannerisms ARE the characters. (I'll add- while I don't think I've seen anything from Roger Allam saying his opinion on the show, both Stephanie Cole and BC have at various points discussed how much they enjoyed making it and liked the scripts and working with JF, which is always nice! And until a couple of years ago Stephanie was a semi-frequent reply guy to JF's Twitter, which was sweet lol.)

It's just so impressive the way that the main cast imbued their characters with so much individuality and personality. Benedict Cumberbatch picks the exact right voice and mannerisms to convey how, no matter how much Martin will try to bluster, he isn't going to win, and his performance is really nimble given the broad array of emotions Martin experiences and the journey he goes on over the course of the show. Stephanie Cole is sharp and sarcastic and knows exactly how to calibrate it so that she shows just enough vulnerability for the situation (on the rare occasions it's needed) and it never feels false, as can sometimes happen. Roger Allam realizes that Douglas is always both performing and pretending that he isn't performing, and being able to express that no matter what emotion is called for is really remarkable. And honestly, JF wrote the role of Arthur as so calibrated to his own abilities that I'm not sure if any other actor could pull off the character without him seeming false.

But- and this is where my having watched St Petersburg comes in- this show also has such fantastic actors playing the side characters, whether recurring actors like Anthony Head and Matilda Ziegler or one off* actors like Prunella Scales** and Phil Davis, are just perfect. And like, they're given great scripts to work with (and these COULDN'T be customized to their strengths, I'm sure, in the same way as the others!), but they bring so much to it that it's incredible.

*Or, often, two off, as actors were sometimes booked for two-episode recording blocks and played different characters in each

**Incidentally, according to a podcast interview JF did, Prunella Scales was in the early stages of dementia when she recorded Wokingham- and while she wasn't always super together in regular conversation, she would immediately snap into a tone-perfect performance as soon as they were recording

I feel like St Petersburg is a really good example of the importance of great side-character actors, because it only has two and they're perfect in totally different ways. First, of course, you get the brilliant Timothy West as the brilliant "all right" Gordon Shappey, who is just amazing. He takes on an (apparently last-minute-warning) attempt at an Australian accent that I am incapable of judging in order to create one of the most enjoyably if despicably slimy characters there is. He just is perfect, and his delivery of "Hailey sends her love though of course she doesn't mean it" is a particular thing of beauty that just shows how a great actor can elevate an already great line into something special. I'm so glad we got him back in the finale.

And then we have Paul Shearer, who is Tommo, and a poster boy for "there are no small parts." I have no idea whether it was JF or David Tyler or his own decision that led to how he said his lines of dialogue- though on the principle that leads GERTI to be an airdot, I'd almost call them dashes of dialogue- but whoever's call it was it was a genius one and executed so well by him. A role that could have been nothing ends up being the one that got some of the most sustained laughs of a hilarious episode. He deserves so much credit.

I know that there are theater troupes that perform Cabin Pressure scripts, and I'm always so curious how they go because I just can't picture anyone else performing the characters. If those plays are good, it's of course a tribute to those actors as well as to JF's quality scripts- but if the characters LIVE for us and become three-dimensional enough to make people want to re-perform them, then it's a tribute to the original actors who embodied- or perhaps envoiced- them. Kudos to them all.

[o-uncle-newt]

THREE: it's just really good for mental health

I've been saying I'd post this and now that I have a nice long day with not much to do, I will- not that I haven't posted about this before. Honestly, one of the most important things to me about Cabin Pressure is that it has a power, shared with very few other things (among them incidentally are one or two key Double Acts), to make me smile/feel better about pretty much anything, no matter how dire, at least for half an hour- and with at least a bit of "afterglow" so to speak lol.

But I've written about it here, and here, and here and here... probably other places too. And I think the thing that impresses me the most is that, so often when I share this, I get loads of people telling me exactly the same thing. I don't know what it is exactly- is it just the comedy? The characters, who are over the top enough not to be IMMEDIATELY identifiable but still relatably human? The clever plots that you can get lost in? The heart and warmth and care? Probably a combination of all of these things.

You'll see some of the more specific examples of the above for me in the links in the prior paragraph, so I'll move on, possibly to a TMI extent, to a more specific thing, that might not surprise people- the impact of Arthur Shappey's Guide to Happiness on me. JF has said, I think, that it's a principle he genuinely holds by, and I know that lots of people agree that it's something that really hits you. And it really hit me too.

So I'll talk a bit about my own journey with it- shifting from being an Arthur to being a Martin (or trying to be). As in, this has concretely helped me become a happier/better person.

I am not exaggerating when I say that every therapist I've ever seen has heard of Cabin Pressure and John Finnemore, and I'm pretty sure all of them have seen the above video from Fitton. Now, like a lot of other people, I really glommed on to the whole idea about how if you expect happiness to come from the big things then you'll end up disappointed when they don't measure up, so find smaller things that will give you smaller pockets of joy in your every day.

Without going into excessive detail, the last few years have been tough for me in some ways. At the time, I was in a terrible work environment that had serious ramifications for my personal life. And I kept on listening to that clip and being like "well yes I can make this better with self care" or whatever. And it did- I'd say it was more make this bearable but at the time that was still a lot.

At one point I was talking to my therapist and she was asking if I felt happy. And I said that on a day to day level I was enjoying myself (there were fun parts of my job, it was a larger situation that was the problem), but that I still often felt really miserable. She asked why and I thought about it and was like- I keep doing random little things but nothing is getting better. I'm still in the same situation I was last week, last month, and last year, and this is lulling me into complacency when the underlying root of the problem hasn't been fixed at all.

So my therapist asked me- what do you mean by complacency? Does that mean you're feeling better/happier than you have been? And I had to think about it but I could definitely say- yes, I was. I'd tried new foods, taken great trips, read interesting books, and had a lot of little pops of enjoyment. The difference was that now that wasn't enough anymore. Then my therapist asked me- "but don't you realize how huge that is? That you're past the hump where something small is the best you can hope for?" And she was right.

The way I think about it, that placement of the clip in Fitton, no matter what JF meant by putting it there and no matter whether he had anything that came later in mind when he did it, ended up just working beautifully. Like, it makes sense that this is coming from Arthur- he's the character who changes the least. He doesn't have to, much, and while I won't go so far as to say he doesn't have the capacity to, even if he did he has a lot of people who are protective of him because they don't think he has the capacity to. He enjoys his life. He doesn't really have any problems and the dreams that he sees as within his reach (aka, not being a "muppet baby pilot") are, for him, on par with the pleasure he gets from throwing an apple back and forth.

It's why Arthur is a great character- he's a reminder of something simpler in all of us. I don't think he's relatable at all, and that's a good thing- what we really love is the way Arthur makes us feel. He's so non-self-absorbed that in the few moments where his equanimity is shaken up, he's so thrown off kilter that we, who are more used to dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, want to jump in front to protect him from them. We value the simplistic way in which he sees our goodness, because to us, things are more complicated.

But that complication is a good thing! That's what allows us to be more than and better than what we currently are, eventually. That can be really hard- especially when we're brought low, to take the work to improve things for ourselves can feel impossible. It can take love and support, it can take grit, and it can take an existing base of self-regard, but it can be done. Arthur may not need to, but we do.

At the same time, we learn something important from Arthur, and in particular Martin does in Fitton. (Douglas too, but with a different kind of application.) Martin thinks he's where he wants to be, but he KNOWS he isn't- he's not being paid, he's constantly bullying, and the facade he puts on is doing nothing to earn him the kind of respect that his essentially-purchased title should, in theory, entitle him to. To him, the way to get through it is to grit his teeth and keep on pretending, assume that if he carries on as he is (knowing that he's not good enough yet but still trying anyway) then he'll end up making it. But that just makes him more uptight and difficult, in the end.

What Arthur recognizes is that you DO need those little bits of happiness to make the big ones doable! If Martin is going to keep on trying for the big breaks, he'll inevitably fail at least some of the time (in his case, far more lol) and that will just dump him even farther down than he started. You start to curse the wind, because at a certain point you're trying to control forces that are uncontrollable and that will never guarantee happiness, just give you a potential chance at it. Once you've appreciated the smaller things that you CAN control, and you boost your mood and mentality that way, you start to recognize that maybe you can move past where you are. That you can get both the little things, the apple-tossing and singing, as well as the new big things you are striving for.

Arthur will never need to go past that first thing- the character as constructed has no interest in it. But as much as he doesn't understand the END of Martin's journey except when paraphrased for him in the terms of various movies (not all of which he actually understands), he understands the beginning more than Martin does- that he needs to have the small happinesses to build him up and make him be ready for whatever else comes his way.

Because here's the thing- if we all lived like Arthur, we'd never be with the loves of our lives in the moonlight, would we? We'd be worried it could go wrong or we wouldn't fully appreciate it, and anyway everyone would love us as much as we want to be loved already, and we'd be too busy soaking in the bath to care about the other thing. But the non-Arthurs of us are resilient enough to WANT the loves of our lives (well, on average- plenty of people don't but they wiil have their own equivalent bigger-picture and higher-stakes wants) and, as a result, to be willing to take the risk of it not being everything we immediately want it to be. But, if it's NOT what we want it to be, Arthur wisely knows that we need to make sure we have a cushion of smaller happinesses to fall back on in the meantime, to build us up until we can try again.

With credit to my therapist, I have to say that this reimagining of the Arthur/Martin paradigm and Martin's journey vs Arthur's stasis in Cabin Pressure has stayed with me- reminding me to give myself the smaller boosts I need as I take bigger leaps and really choose the goals that I care about. I'm in a different job that is a better situation, and while I still have plenty of problems, I've learned to find ways to balance them out with the smaller things that make life worth living as I try to overcome them more essentially and hopefully permanently. In the meanwhile, I have Arthur to help.

[o-uncle-newt]

FOUR: it's just so funny, guys

When last year I was doing my listenthrough, at a certain point I stopped including mentions of how funny a particular episode was because... of course they all were. In fact, there are only a couple of episodes that I could name as having plotlines that, IMO, aren't funny and yet even those episodes have some of the most classic joke sequences in the series.* If I sat here and listed every good joke, I'd basically just be reproducing 3/4 of the scripts.

*Qik has a not very funny plot anchored by a not-funny-at-all character, Nancy Whatsherface, but Le Bear Polar is legitimately iconic. Kuala Lumpur even JF doesn't like very much, but Arthur's steward training sequence is basically perfect.

He's just so so good at including the humor in the narrative, is the thing. I did a post last year about Ipswich that was about how good JF is, or rather grew to be, at plot, in particular seamlessly integrating plot and theme and humor. The thing is, even in episodes that aren't as brilliant as Ipswich, the humor is always amazing, and as is obvious given his simultaneous and ensuing comedy career in other formats, he just really gets comedy. But I'd argue that while lots of writers are good at writing jokes, he's really good at writing the RIGHT jokes and putting them in the RIGHT storylines in the mouths of the RIGHT actors.

I think it comes down to a few things-

He's SO good at mining existing situations and limitations for comedy. (Also for plot, which is separate but certainly related.) Obviously this would be a skill that would serve him in good stead in his sketch comedy career, but it's especially good here because instead of circling a sketch around a particular joke, the jokes have to be part of the broader plot, and so he has a more constrained field of search and takes the maximum advantage of it. According to an interview of him on a podcast, the entire conversation with Qik where Douglas convinces Martin that their plane can, in fact, do a polar expedition is essentially JF's replay of a conversation with his dad about whether the kind of plane he chose for GERTI to be back in Ipswich could do a polar expedition- he wanted to do the plot but was worried he'd hamstrung himself by defining the plane he was using, but instead he was able to take that exact limitation and make the actual situation far funnier (though again, I think Qik as an episode has limitations). (Incidentally, while on that subject I want to take the opportunity to appreciate his attention to detail overall. Recently I've been reading Admiral Cloudberg's series on air disasters and I recognized a shocking number of terms from lines that were essentially just him setting the scene for unrelated plots. No idea how overall accurate all of his plane-flying asides are, but the parts that matched up are super cool especially now that I know what a lot of it means.)

At the same time, he has such a great imagination and knew how to cleanly insert the products of it into an episode- obviously he repeats some standard sitcom beats (I think that Rotterdam, one of the funniest episodes, escapes classic status just because "characters get confronted with the cooler versions of themselves" is such a well-worn sitcom-episode plot) but even when he does he can be really original. Not sure where he got the idea of strafing a children's party with a hard-candy bomb and killing a koi from, but it was a stroke of brilliance. He's also surprisingly good at taking previously-written imaginative/comic sequences and putting them very deftly into his scripts- basically the whole "can you imagine 100 otters" scene is from a blog post and you can see exactly how he adapted the exact phrasing but it doesn't matter because he made it fit seamlessly into the new scene and into the overall plot. On a similar note, he's great at using his imagination to come up with different kinds of joke styles- for example, the running joke of them playing games in the flight deck, but then going wild with a) what kinds of games and b) how to mine maximum humor from them. There are just so many classic, brilliant games and he's so good at it that he'll even construct whole episodes around series of games (like Limerick).

He's so good at writing for particular people's voices! He's mentioned that for JFSP he will sometimes call the actors in to do a "silly voices day" and then write sketches based on it, and it's such a cool concept and also so clear how good he is at it. For some TV sketch shows, it can feel like someone wrote a sketch without knowing who in the cast would be available for filming and then they cast whoever would fit the parts- JFSP basically never feels that way, and on the sitcom side, neither does Cabin Pressure. He doesn't nail the voices immediately on day one but it's pretty dang close. And when he goes on to write jokes, not only do they work perfectly for the actors' ways of speaking, but they're nearly always funnier for having been said by that particular actor. The words "you mulled it?!" in context are already funny, but it wouldn't have been as hilarious if not for Roger Allam's impeccable delivery. JF knew he had a five star cast and knew exactly how to take advantage of their gifts- and, of course, he'd had plenty of experience writing for himself and so knew how to give himself jokes and dialogue that would sound perfect coming from his mouth.

The storyline thing... I mean, functionally, it comes down to what I was saying above about how good he is at combining plot arc, themes, and comedy. It's so good that it can be both hard and satisfying to dissect exactly how it was done, but suffice it to say, I think that's the thing that's his real talent. This week I had a few exchanges with a fellow fan on here about some limitations I have noticed in his sketch comedy- nothing major, but I think the thing that elevates him from being a good-to-great sketch comedian to being a sublime comedic-plot writer is his deftness with construction. Lots of people are funny, lots of other people are good at creating well done plots that incorporate theme, he's fantastic at both and at their integration and it's a really special gift.

[o-uncle-newt]

FIVE: it celebrates vulnerability

Sadly ended up in a big rush today so for this one I'll be kind of rehashing some themes that I wrote about at greater length in my 2023 advent. But they're themes that are incredibly meaningful to me so honestly I'd probably have done it anyway.

Sometime in the next couple of days I'll be writing more about the impact that Cabin Pressure has had on my mental health. But I'll start off with a particular facet of this- it contains stories and characters that demonstrate how difficult it can to be vulnerable, what kinds of conditions help make vulnerability easier, and, overall, how important vulnerability is.

When you look at it, vulnerability is an incredibly important part of pretty much every character's arc. (Obviously, some credit here to JF's Zurich farewell bear facts.) I wrote about it extensively in some of my last year's advent, like Douz, Fitton, Gdansk, Limerick, Uskerty, Vaduz... honestly it's all over the place and part of everyone's arc, and maybe that's just because it's such a human thing but it's so well conveyed here that it's beautiful.

I think what I love most about it is that it includes storylines that explain how difficult it can be to get rid of defense mechanisms and open up. All of these characters have defensive shields- Martin's captain's hat, Carolyn's airdot, Douglas's scheming and omniscient facade, and sometimes even Arthur's ignoring of consequences (even if part of that is also just dimness). All of these characters, at some point, have to break them down and let people in, and in all of these cases it is its own journey. For Douglas to open up about his divorce took a whole season from beginning to end, and sketched out beautifully- for Carolyn to realize that Herc was for real (and needed her to be real as well) took two seasons and two specials. We've already talked about how good these characters are, but this particular facet of them is so beautifully played out.

Given stuff going on in my own life, this particular theme is incredibly resonant to me and it means a lot that it's a consistent one.

[o-uncle-newt]

SIX: it spawned an awesome fandom!

It's late so I'll keep it short and sweet- despite in many ways spawning off of a... challenging fandom, Cabin Pressure has really managed to build an incredible fan base.

I'm not saying it's been drama free- though I'll fully admit that I try to keep myself away from it- but when you think about how the fandomy element got to Cabin Pressure, and how that happened through Sherlock and what a shitshow that could be sometimes (and yes, I was there too), it just makes it even more remarkable how people coming from that could coalesce into something like this.

One thing that I think is really cool is that as much as Benny C may have become the major fandom center in some ways (at stage doors, Martin becoming both the fandom woobie and [bafflingly] something of a fandom bicycle, a weird number of Sherlock crossover fics), people didn't let that creep into how the show itself, in its "real world" context, was received and perceived for the most part. JF mentioned in interviews at the time that he'd been nervous that fans would only come for BC and that they'd only laugh at his bits, but the show managed to make people fall in love with it on its terms, and no matter what they were doing with the characters in their own time, people really turned out for the show as it was, as the BBC Radio 4 audience had already been enjoying it for two series.

A lot of credit for this definitely goes to JF for being welcoming to new fans (I'm sure I'll talk about this more in the future) as well as to the show itself for being... well, the kind of thing appreciated by cool people lol (a bit tautological but whatever, it's true!). Regardless, super cool that the group that gathered around this show was able to integrate into the existing fans, adopt this new thing on its own terms, boost it, and in general just love it the way we all do. And I'm not only talking about the people who have stuck with it since then, or who have joined the JF fandom. Every time a Tumblr post or something goes viral about Cabin Pressure you can see people posting nostalgically about having loved it and how sweet and funny and well done it was. People love it whether they're like "Benny C is in it but everyone else is good too!" or "it's so good you even forget Benny C is in it." People just recognize its awesomeness and somehow people around it tend to be equally awesome.