#this is about the british broadcasting company

[doomdoomofdoom]

If anyone in the notes revives the Superwholock Era "BBC has only one shirt" jokes, I am manifesting at their house and taking the batteries out of every single device they own.

Hi Neil ! I've noticed that Roland Blum's chair from The Good Fight is the same chair from Crowley's flat. Was that on purpose, or was it just a coincidence?

There is only one chair on television.

[hereforyourdispleasure]

WHERE AER YEW

AND OIM SEW SARRAY

[kerryweaverlesbian]

I think. Personally. It is annoying and bad that they had ghost bobby. After the triumph of Death's Door. If they wanted to symbolically show da boys Moving On then they coulda just done that. Having Bobby not be a physical ghost would be better for showing that even.

When I was recounting the finale to the captive audience of my sister 2 christmases ago she recalled that Pearl and Dean had 'a dad who was around too much' meaning Bobby. Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the plot of supernatural but to me very funny.

[bbcnewsfail]

remember, it's important to convey skepticism about whether Indigenous peoples are telling the truth--it's all part of objective reporting!

[scribbleseas]

Straight Laced, Chapter VIII: To Be A Keen Observer…

Description: After the London’s Royal Ballet company’s prima ballerina goes missing within a string of mysterious disappearances among the ballet’s young ballerinas, you finally get your chance to debut in the leading role, taking on the position’s physical toil and immense social pressure. Although this role was supposed to be your grand jeté into the spotlight, it is quickly complicated when these disappearances catch the eye of Ciel Phantomhive — the Queen’s Guard Dog. He is a captious and shrewd man who also happens to be one of London’s most eligible bachelors.

For enough profit for you to secure your freedom for the first time, Lord Phantomhive double casts you as both his accomplice to solving these dancer disappearances and… his pretend lover. While debuting as London’s new prima ballerina, you must perfect a brand new routine: deceiving all of the nation’s polite society while actively searching for a serial killer — all while being an immigrant from France with a dancer’s reputation.

What could go wrong when you realize this off-stage performance of yours may not be an act at all?

Story Warnings: detailed description of gore, pain, and violence, detailed death, smut & explicit sexual scenes, allusions to non-consensual sex, objectification, prostitution, allusions to under-aged prostitution, smoking, drinking, eating disorder tendencies (food restriction, frequent references to wanting to maintain a certain weight, over-practicing & exercising), infidelity, fake courtship, swearing

Author’s Note: I have nothing to say for myself, besides thank you so much for reading! And thank you so much for sticking with me. I’m sorry about that last cliffhanger. (Kind of.)

Dan

⇐ PREVIOUS CHAPTER | NEXT CHAPTER ⇒

MASTERLIST

November 10, 1895

The British Museum

The Yard. The press. Throngs of pedestrians fleeing from the museum to catch a glimpse of the chaos. Flashing lenses immortalizing Maisie Stannard’s bleeding body, craning necks, overlapping questions.

“Lord Phantomhive, Lord Phantomhive, who’dunnit?” someone demanded, sick comedy in their voice.

Now the public knew. They no longer had the benefit of a quiet investigation.

The Same Night, Hours Later

Ciel’s Estate

The evening’s fiasco was practically the worst-case scenario for any crime scene, Ciel thought, staring into the lively orange licks of flames in his fireplace. The contained inferno crackled, demolishing the kindling Finny packed inside moments before their return.

The fall night was brisk, the draft blowing against his window, causing balding tree branches to scream.

Finally left alone, the Earl of Phantomhive loosened his tie, slouched behind his desk, and allowed his fingers to knit in his dark hair. He released a frustrated groan he’d long been holding, spat out a curse he’d long bit down in the face of the curious public. They wanted to construct a story that would attempt to broadcast Ciel’s shock, but he would never give them the satisfaction of witnesssing a Phantomhive plan go awry.

Still, the predicament was an embarrassment. He wanted the killer to be William, but the suspect never truly felt proper—even as he watched the Yard escorted the man in handcuffs. He’d merely convinced himself William was completely guilty because it was the most convenient solution, and that was worse than a confident response being wrong.

Ciel’s eye strained from analyzing the list of guests from the gala. The names and titles were forged into his brain, and yet, how could he stop? Another person was dead because of his shortsightedness. It was a smear on his name and reputation, one far worse than courting a prima ballerina.

At the end of the day, he should have known better. It was too convenient for the killer to be William. Ciel doubted he had much of a capacity to kill—not the intellect, not the bravado, and not the motive.

Was he a violent criminal who took what he felt he deserved no matter who he hurt? Certainly. But was he intelligent enough to poison a young woman slowly using dimethylmercury? To lure a young woman to a bridge and dispose of her in the river beneath? Not to Ciel. He had to be missing a significant part of this investigation. What could he be missing? Who could he be ignoring?

Someone had to have known William’s crimes against members of his company, and plotted to frame him. The death had to be connected to the rest of them—too convenient to be a coincidence. Y/n knew her. They were both part of the same company— rivals, even. All of the dancers were a part of this company, at one point in their short-lived careers. Even the victims who were working somewhere new during their time of death or the last day they were seen, worked under William at one point in time.

Y/n said that the incidents all seem to take place on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Days where the full company rehearsed The Nutcracker in full, and Natasha was occupied with costume fittings. The company was in its last two weeks of playing Swan Lake and now it was preparing to welcome the holiday season with the festive ballet. It always had a popular run, causing it to start at the end of November until the weekend after Christmas.

That couldn’t be a coincidence, either. Ciel thought it incriminated William because it ensured that his company— including his wife — would be at their most distracted. Perhaps, the real killer assumed Ciel would draw that conclusion. They would have needed to break into William’s South Hampton home to plant the weapon used to kill Janet Fischer, as well. It seemed that estate was the only property William left unkept.

“I’ve brought your tea, my Lord,” Sebastian said, his habit of breaking Ciel’s focus entirely too common. The Earl knew better than to be startled by his demon butler. After all, the being was at the mercy of his orders. They both knew the terms of their contract intimately well: Sebastian obeyed all of Ciel’s commands and once they apprehend those responsible for the deaths of the previous Phantomhive heads, Sebastian could consume his soul.

“How damned am I, Sebastian?” Ciel asked, half pressing for what the butler made of tonight’s accident and half assessing the damage dealt between him and Y/n, given that the butler had just delivered her a night snack. She was never one to hide her feelings, surely giving Sebastian an earful about how Ciel managed to offend her. Uncovering just what had sent Y/n into her tirade beckoned at Ciel more than he liked, distracting him even more than the investigation was. The prima ballerina was so nonchalant about her promiscuity; could their relations have truly meant that much to her?

Did she feel an inescapable sense of dread and thrill around him, too? A spark so addicting that all she could do was be near him? Just like a good sip of that sweet wine she adored.

“What are you referring to?” While the butler poured a cup of tea, he lifted an eyebrow at the Earl, questioning him. A knowing smile pulled at his lips.

“Don’t you play dumb. You know whom I speak of.” The irritation in Ciel’s voice filled the room.

Sebastian merely chuckled at him. “How do you think making an enemy out of the Norfolk duchy by refusing his only daughter would end for you, sir?” His question was anything but accusatory— amused at most. Curious to get an idea of Ciel’s honest priorities: the wise match, Caroline and her presumptuous mother, or the correct match. The prima ballerina. His prima ballerina, as they worked so hard to make the public believe.

Except, they didn’t understand how much Ciel was just as much her Earl of Phantomhive.

All there was in polite society was Gwen, insisting she and Caroline come to his estate for tea. A meeting he was far from in the position to reject, out of respect to the current Duke of Norfolk. Ciel should have put a formal end to the slow beginnings of courtship he’d hinted to Caroline. At the time, he felt there was nothing to end, since nothing had really begun.

Had the Norfolk line not been in jeopardy, Ciel doubted Gwen would have continued to pursue him for Caroline with such insistence, especially after he announced his courtship of Y/n. Without a male heir, the duchy needed to secure its new duke by marrying Caroline to a suitable noble. The position had been attractive at the time, but now, Ciel hardly felt the appeal. Instead, he intended to tell Y/n that Gwen invited herself to the estate for tea after she forced him to share a cordial dance with her daughter, but Y/n fled the ballroom before he could.

“I could withstand it. And if I could not, you would see me through,” Ciel insisted, turning his gaze back down to the names on his newest list of names— a compilation of suspects with motivation to either kill company ballerina Maise Stannard or the wife of a plagiarizing artist with a legion of enemies. “Unless something changed in our contract within the last seven-some years?” Ciel prompted, scowling at the supernatural being.

The side of Sebastian’s mouth twitched. “Of course not,” he confirmed, “though I may not be able to shield you from the wrath of a woman scorned. Those dangers are entirely different from one another, you’ll come to understand.”

Such reflecting over his personal life was a painful waste of effort. He needed to prioritize his thoughts. Another person died, dammit.

The distinction between company ballerina Maisie and wife of conman Maisie was critical because it decided whether the serial killer was bold enough to kill in front of a high-end gala lined with security or if one of Stannard’s enemies was sending him a message.

Ciel’s eyebrows knit together, unsure if Sebastian was referring to Y/n or Caroline. He cared significantly more about the former. Though, it was only fair to note that Y/n never made her intentions clear enough to be shunned in the first place. She was enigmatic, and beautiful with a puzzling charm— Ciel would’ve had to be daft to ignore that about her. But that didn’t translate to wanting him beyond physical companionship… at least it hadn’t until she confronted him.

Though he couldn’t help but wonder: didn’t Y/n know better? Didn’t she understand that she was deserving of someone who could love unconditionally. In what world could he? Ciel couldn’t even promise never to lie to her.

All relationships and promises in Ciel’s life were conditional. He was a self-serving man—the remnants of the disturbed boy who returned to the land of the living seven years ago with a ravenous demon counting the days to the end of their contract. If Ciel couldn’t even promise to never lie to Y/n—how could she expect him to love her? Did she love him?

There was no loving him. Not without letting it destroy her life. They both knew that. And yet… he had already given into his passionate whims with her. He’d already decided to throw his reservations to the wind, the last of his resilience shattering like glass when she broke into sobs caused by him.

“I thought I was protecting her,” Ciel replied simply, taking a drink out of his hot tea. He welcomed the scorching burn as it traveled down his tongue. The warmth filled in his empty chest. ”I did not scorn her.”

It didn’t matter if she loved him, nor did it matter how he felt about her. The consequences of anything more than a partnership between them would be immeasurable no matter what, but he was more than equipped to handle them.

Could Ciel justify trapping a ballerina in a life where the rest of society would remind her that she was an outsider every day? Gwen and Caroline were the least destructive instance of the social persecution Y/n would face for climbing the social ladder so ambitiously as the rest of the world would see it.

When the world looked at Y/n, they didn’t see her natural aptitude for investigation, her intelligence. Her humor. They saw the misdeeds put upon her by forces much greater than herself. They saw the reckless apathy that was placed on all ballerinas, and assumed that it was their own fault.

No one would see the regard in Y/n that Ciel took so long to notice. They misread her. And they would never care to read her properly until it was too late.

Until she condemned them in a tearful diatribe across the street from the British Museum. That spirit was what convinced Ciel that she had the potential to feasibly manage. If such was the life she truly desired for herself.

“Go get another history on Maisie Stannard,” Ciel ordered Sebastian, wanting to be left alone again. He felt the demon attempting to dissect him, and it was suffocating. Sebastian hadn’t even deigned to reply, merely looking at him with unconcealed amusement. He liked watching Ciel wrestle with such foreign conflict, provoking him for sport to further insult the injury— there was nothing insightful he wished to add.

“Yes, my Lord.” After a disingenuous bow, the demon was gone.

November 11, 1895, The Next Morning

Y/n’s Rehearsal Studio

“No,” Y/n’s irritated voice snapped the moment Ciel opened the door of his own estate’s practice room and let himself inside.

Rehearsal studio, rather.

He released a sigh that he’d been holding from the moment Mey-Rin told him that Y/n would be absent from their breakfast table. He knew she would make a childish effort to avoid him, but in all honesty, he lacked the time and the patience to entertain it.

Y/n sat in the middle of the room in a nude leotard, her legs fanned open on either side of her. Her back was straight and elongated, forming a perfect line with her neck. It looked effortless. All of her movements looked light and easy, despite the rage that her pursed lips and creased forehead displayed.

She didn’t need to turn around to look at him. Instead, she ignored his image in the floor-to-ceiling mirror’s reflection in front of them. Ciel had to read her expression from the glass, since she purposely kept her back to him.

Ciel caught the variety of materials sitting between her spread legs, several pairs of newly broken in pointe shoes in a row, scissors, adhesive, and a needle and yarn for sewing. They were the same items Y/n used to break in and darn new pairs of pointe shoes for balance and comfort. Ciel knew this routine well— it cost him hundreds of pounds a week to purchase Y/n five or six new pairs weekly.

“Y/n, we have much to discuss. Skipping meals with me will not put an end to the investigation… nor our personal differences,” Ciel told her, carefully stepping closer with the caution a soldier would in a minefield. He supposed a rehearsal studio was just that for Y/n: a battleground.

“All I wanted was a few hours away from you and your investigation. You cannot even give me that?” Y/n corrected coldly, giving the shoe in her hand a hearty smack against the expensive flooring to further break it in. Apparently, all ballerinas had to make their own custom alteration rituals to break in their shoes the exact way they needed it. Y/n liked to eviscerate her shoes’ insoles and shave down the bottoms, stretch the shoe, repair it with adhesive, and darn the flat bit of it.

His investigation? So now it was only his?

“It is not a crime for a ballerina to break in her shoes—I hardly have time as it is, and Nutcracker opens next week,” she continued, still refusing to look at him. She seemed satisfied with the amount of pressure she put on the shoe and squeezed adhesive into its stretched interior.

Of course she wouldn’t look at him. Ciel embarrassed her because he let his preconceived notions about her professions blind him to the extent of her feelings. Ballerinas like Y/n were not inherently promiscuous, and he, despite having one functioning eye, missed that she felt more for him than lust. In what world does a principal dancer fall for a jaded Earl, anyhow?

And he was somehow even more blindsided by his own intricate feelings for her. It was most likely too late. And that was for the best, wasn’t it? It was supposed to be, but the guilty discomfort that sat in his stomach insisted otherwise. It was simply too late.

“The last time I checked, a certain prima ballerina always insisted it was our investigation,” Ciel replied, watching Y/n’s eyes roll in response.

“Clearly, she did not know what she was talking about,” Y/n put her sewing materials and pointe shoes to the side once she was satisfied with the layers of adhesive applied. She continued facing the mirror, spreading into a center split and pushing her torso to the floor in a deep stretch. “Being wrong about so many things makes a person a true lavette, no?” Her stretching position muffled her voice somewhat, but the vitriol was clear to him.

She was comparing her intellect to a dish towel? Honestly? Ciel fought the urge to reflect the prima ballerina’s scornful eye roll to her.

After all, she purposefully referencing both their investigation and their personal matters— enough to show Ciel that there was little to be achieved with the stubborn ballerina at that time. The blows were too fresh.

“What is there for us to discuss, anyhow? That guest list will take ages to sift through, and Sebastian’s interview notes…” Y/n rolled her shoulders back and sat back up only to inhale and bring her torso back to the floor. Her arms stretched in front of her, showing off the sculpted muscle she forged through dance.

Her leotard clung to the trained muscles down her back and arms, causing Ciel’s mouth to run dry as he adjusted his trousers. (Unintentionally recalling her body’s warmth and strength under his fingertips did little to help.)

That realization caused Ciel to moisten his lips, quietly thankful that Y/n was pointedly averting her gaze from him. She would’ve caught and translated that pensive— scandalous — look in seconds, and rightfully called him out for it.

“I want to visit William today,” Ciel managed, barely maintaining his stable tone in the face of his straying thoughts. “The Yard said the bullet found in Maisie was consistent with his Winchester collection. And I still dislike that the Southampton house is William’s only unstaffed possession.” It was all too convenient. Too connected— down to the murders matching the company’s rehearsal schedule.

Even the gala was on a Nutcracker rehearsal evening: a night where it was guaranteed Natasha Wood had her hands full and the company was half alive after such a rigorous day.

“That sounds like the perfect plan, Lord Phantomhive,” Y/n answered bitterly, extending an arm over her head while she leaned to the side. She still had her legs parted in a center split.

Lord Phantomhive was a gut punch. It took all of his composure to hide his crawling discomfort. That had to be the first time he recoiled from the weight of his surname.

To her, he was Ciel. She had seen to it— demanded it, even.

“You can handle that on your own. He will not talk with me there, surely,” she added, her bored tone causing his fingers to curl into a frustrated fist at his side. Finally catching her stare, he noticed that her eyes were bleary as if she had been crying. Even her lips seemed bitten.

Ciel had to ignore the striking urge in his body that begged him to kiss her. Now that he knew her prowess, the way she moved her lips with the same elegance she did the rest of her body, it made her allure all the more intense. So much so that they forced Ciel to skip several heavy seconds before replying to her poor excuse for not wanting to be in the same room with him. He had been occupied with admiring her.

“I would prefer—” he started to object, only for Y/n to interrupt.

“Please see yourself out. I must rehearse, I am running on borrowed time as it is. The last Swan Lake showing is tonight,” Y/n said expectantly, assuming Ciel didn’t know her performance schedule. He merely happened to have committed it to memory.

Y/n rose to her feet. She was already wearing an older pair of pointe shoes, suggesting that she had been practicing before deciding to break in new shoes.

Having risen from the center of the floor, she took graceful steps closer to the mirror, fully turning her back to him as she put herself in the starting position for the Sugar Plum Fairy Variation. After putting in hours of labor as her unpaid pianist, Ciel could recognize those soft, exaggerated steps anywhere.

His stomach only twisted into a tighter knot, offended that Y/n would prefer to rehearse in complete silence than in his piano playing. After all, she once told him that she couldn’t keep time without it.

In unexpected surrender, Ciel closed the door behind him, softly letting the knob click back into place.

It was simply too late.

The Same Day, Hours Later

Scotland Yard’s London Headquarters

Even for a man living in a holding cell, William Wood did not look well. His facial hair, what was formerly a tasteful goatee, was now untamed and slightly overgrown. Deep exhaustion carved bags under his eyes. His sudden fall from grace seemed to age him years, even though it was only a week or two since Ciel made the arrest.

“They told me you’d be coming to see me today,” William grunted, dressed in plain clothes. He wasn’t formally charged yet, but Ciel and the Yard agreed that the threat of allowing an arrested serial killer to remain free before his sentencing was too great to risk. Ciel also needed easy access to William in the event they were wrong.

The criminal’s gray eyes attempted to bore into Ciel’s soul, but really, they were tired. Unfocused. Desperate. He reminded him of a cornered tiger— too proud to submit, but too exhausted to finish the fight.

“Yes… I have questions that demand answers. From you.” Ciel answered carefully. He exchanged a look with the officers guarding the door, silently urging them to clear their throats and seeing themselves out, guarding from the outside of the room. William’s holding cell sat in an isolated room from the rest of the headquarters. The basement was fortified with cement, making the area drafty and dark.

He wouldn’t reveal the news that there was another murdered ballerina, but there were other means to extract the information the situation required.

A condescending smirk twitched at William’s lips, unsurprised. “And you expect me to talk? To you?” He asked, his jubilant tone dripping with malice. “You’ve ruined my life, my wife’s…our livelihood.”

“No one forced you to cheat on your wife. Or assault defenseless young women. Or murder them in cold blood,” Ciel snapped, raising his tone. Natasha, from what Y/n said, was running the entirety of the company without William in the first place. She didn’t need him— he was a pathetic excuse for an heir to a business. That had to be clearer to her than anyone.

Only now, he made her work infinitely more complicated. Especially since the body of Maisie Stannard was plastered all over the front pages of most newspapers that morning, each depicting the mysterious murder that occurred near one of the side entrances of The British Museum.

“You don’t talk about my wife to me,” William’s fingers curled into fists at his sides as he took a step closer to the cell’s bars that separated them. His complexion was shades lighter. “I never killed anyone, either,” he was sure to remind Ciel.

“You will answer my questions, one way or another. How much of your blood gets spilled depends entirely on you, William,” Ciel replied, appreciating the cell wall that separated them. One of them was vulnerable, and it was certainly not him. It would never be.

The Earl pressed the nose of his Nanget Revolver into William’s hip, sliding the nose of the weapon between the bars. He smiled at the defeat that fought the stubborn ferocity in William’s colorless irises, placidly putting the weapon back into his jacket pocket just as smoothly as he’d taken it out.

“Do we have an understanding here?” Ciel asked impatiently. “I am only interested in the truth.”

It was exhilarating to watch the desperate fire extinguish in William’s face, the fighting militance in his shoulders dissipate. His fists unfurled as he sighed, coming to terms with his defeat. He was just smart enough to understand that concept— a lesson Ciel and Y/n fought hard to teach him.

“It’s not like I have a choice,” the former businessman crossed his arms, ignoring the weapon that Ciel threatened him with.

“Your Southampton house,” Ciel started, “why is it unstaffed? When was the last time you were there, before you instructed Y/n Y/l/n to meet you there?”

“I told Natasha I sold it, but it’s been my family’s for generations. I used the place for… meetings I didn’t want her to know about,” William sighed, choosing his words cautiously. “That time with…Y/n… was the first time I’ve been there since my trip to France. So I haven’t been since the end of September. Do I get to know why you’re asking?” He asked sarcastically.

The last time Janet was seen was September 27th.

“When did you leave, William?” Ciel asked with a newfound sense of urgency overriding his frustrations with the man. His mouth was dry, his heartbeat picking up. “Do you know the exact day you departed?”

William shrugged, either not noticing Ciel’s pique or not caring. “September 28th, probably? Early morning.”

Is that enough time to murder a woman— she was projected to have died late that night — hide the murder weapon in Southampton, and return to the London ports by dawn to leave the country? It wasn’t.

”Did anyone have access to your property? Anyone?”

“No one should have. I only… asked my wife to dispose of hers, after I told her I sold the property,” William frowned. It seemed it was only dawning on the careless man that his wife might have lied to him, curious as to the lack of official documentation from the sale, any shift in finances, given the major role in managing their company, according to Y/n.

“She wouldn’t… think I still use the property…” he mumbled the afterthought slowly with disbelief.

The more Ciel asked of William, the more of him and Natasha he understood. They fell in love because she transferred from a ballet school in Russia and starred in a company production of Sleeping Beauty. William was still learning how to run the company, one of the investments out of a larger corporation, but he fell in love with Natasha, the prima ballerina, at the time.

Natasha overworked herself in the role, causing a hip injury to end her professional career only a year into it. And that was two years ago. Now she was the company’s director—nothing like the inspired dancer she once was, William insisted.

He lost sight of his love for the young ingenue because the injury killed her. What was left was a completely different woman. Tired, bitter, frustrated from what she lost...only for her marriage to slowly decline the more she lost herself.

Opportunity, motive…was there a means? It was now of the utmost importance that Ciel found the answer to that question. No matter how Y/n would feel about his investigating Natasha, her mentor. Ciel trusted his instinct—the tugging in the pit of his stomach. The alarm that he felt.

How could he not have seen it sooner? He needed to leave. He needed to stop her before she left for her performance.

It took a frenzied carriage ride through the crowded London streets, but Sebastian’s demonic carriage driving managed to put Ciel in front of his manor just as Y/n was leaving for the opera house. He was always chasing after her, it seemed, but he didn’t care.

For her, he would. She would, for him. Or before he broke her heart, she might have. He was too late, in that regard, but he could stop her here and now.

“Y/n, stop, this is important!” Ciel stumbled out of his carriage, having stepped out of it before Sebastian could stop entirely. He had to intercept her.

The ballerina scoffed at the nerve of him, begging her to stop in her tracks and hear him out for the second instance in a row. At the same time, Ciel demanded that Finny keep Y/n’s carriage stationery for the moment through a brief look, causing his gardener’s superhuman grip to tighten on the horses’ reins. He gave Ciel a resolute nod, his jaw firm.

“What? Is this chasing a daily occurrence?” Y/n quipped bitterly, just as Ciel expected her to. “You have never cared to attend one of my performances before,” she accused, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder. Her hand fell still on the carriage door’s handle, frowning at him.

“I have reason to suspect that Natasha is—“ he started gravely, pronouncing his words carefully. He knew what Y/n would say, but he could only prove this theory with her help. If Ciel was right, one misstep could make them the adversaries of one incredibly violent, envious, and dangerous criminal who played the role of a wistful, wise mentor. And played it well.

Immediately, Y/n’s face reddened, defensive. “Stop,” she insisted, her voice hoarse. She turned the handle on the carriage door, causing Ciel to reach out and grab it himself, his hand engulfing hers.

He needed her to approach this logically.

Y/n’s face jerked to look at him, her hand attempting to move with the same speed, but Ciel’s grip kept hers stagnant. She gave their hands a long, hard look.

“You have no idea what Natasha has done for so many of us, how little I would have without her. She would never do this to any of us,” Y/n’s voice wavered.

And what has she done for you? She allows men to abuse you. She encourages you to skip nourishment to maintain some shallow aesthetic. She hasn’t reported any of these missing cases to any of you—

“—She does not know about them!” Y/n interrupted, wide eyed, tears threatening to fall. He had said that out loud. “I would not have this opportunity without her. I have known her for years. You, I have known for? A month? You care about me as much as she does? At all?”

“I care about you more than you know, Y/n,” Ciel replied, trying to keep his voice measured, in spite of his pounding heart. He could feel his pulse racing.

“You do not.”

“I do.”

“Then you show it by dancing with another woman in front of me? By inviting her to your home where I live as a guest the night after we were intimate?” Y/n asked, tears rolling down her cheeks. Ciel’s stomach sank. That was what had caused her outburst at the party: Gwen had lied to her. He didn’t invite the duchess; the duchess had invited herself.

His crime was failing to properly refuse her at the gala. Ciel intended to send his regrets the following day by insisting he had an overseas meeting.

“I did not invite the duchess and her daughter. Gwen seems to have lied to you,” he said, the force behind his words extinguishing. “I realized… that… I don’t want my marriage to be a business venture. I don’t want Caroline to be my Countess—I’ve hardly ever spoken to her! I would want…” he let his next word hang in the air. It filled the few centimeters that separated them.

You.

“I need to leave now or I will be late,” Y/n’s free hand wiped away another tear that escaped her tired eyes. “This is my last Swan Lake performance, Ciel. Please.”

She didn’t believe him. And he didn’t blame her. He had warned her about himself a long time ago.

Every instinct in Ciel refused, but he released the hand that he held stagnant on the carriage door handle. “Fine. You may,” he sighed, exchanging the same look with Finny. Y/n opened the carriage and sat inside, closing the door in his face. Again.

“Sebastian, this is an order. You will protect her as you would myself. Now go. Stay out of sight unless the situation demands it.”

In the meantime, Ciel could escort himself to the performance. He had a chance. No way in hell would he let himself squander it.

The Same Evening

The Royal Opera House

For the entirety of his life, Ciel was a keen observer. He could see through a liar’s carefully constructed facade by a glance, the bravado and charismatic grace that Y/n enlisted to maintain her confidence. The Phantomhive empire was as prosperous as it was because of his ability to read and interpret those around him… and manipulate them accordingly.

Now, all of his expert focus fell on the prima ballerina, just as blazing and intense as the spotlight that illuminated her.

Until this point, Ciel avoided attending Y/n’s performances because they knew they were spellbinding. He was more than aware of her talents—even watching her mumble through her moves as she rehearsed was enchanting. He had pointedly refused to allow himself the indulgence necessary to freely watch the woman act in front of an audience, encapsulating a character through mood and movement when he had grown so accustomed to admiring her individualism.

Rather than tell her so, he’d only insinuated that he was too occupied to attend these performances, despite her frequent invitations. Selfishly, he used to prefer her subdued look of disappointment than run the risk of her noticing the way he fell for her. Without meaning to. In fact, while actively trying not to.

Her raw pain was clear as she depicted Odette grieving the prince’s betrayal, having fallen for Odile’s impersonation of her. It wasn’t unlike her face moments before she stepped in the carriage in order to fulfill this very performance, or even her expression in the studio, or in front of the museum the night before. She channeled her hurt into her work—just as he did. She evolved with each step, every twist, in spite of him. Because of everything he put her through.

The bouquet in his tightening grip crinkled, the decorative paper around it crumbling from the frustration he let out on it. Ciel could hardly hear it over the orchestra in the pit, the assortment of musicians and their quality instruments masterfully recreating Tchaikovsky. But that wasn’t the most impressive aspect of the show— that recognition belonged to Y/n entirely.

He had to correct this gnawing worry in his stomach. The feeling that he was, once again, on the brink of being too late.

The moment the curtain drew after the company’s final bows, Ciel sprang from his seat.

He wouldn’t be too late. At the very least, he owed Y/n that.

[mercurygray]

So I Hear You Liked...World War Two Dramas

What's that? You said you wanted a World War Two series where women actually speak to each other? Have I got a deal for you!

When Band of Brothers first came out, I did not have cable, but what I did have was a card at a library that owned seemingly every PBS drama ever broadcast. I know and love a lot of these shows, and I hope you do, too.

As we wait for Masters of the Air to join us, maybe you can fill some time with one of these!

Classic: These shows were made in the 70s and 80s and while the production values are not the same as something made more recently, they're all fun to watch.

Danger UXB - daily life in a bomb disposal unit.

Dad's Army - comedy show about the Home Guard.

Hogan's Heroes - situational comedy about life in a POW camp.

Piece of Cake - follows British pilots stationed in France as the Phony War begins.

Homefront Perspectives:

✨Housewife, 49 - Based on the wartime diary of Nella Last, who participated in the Mass Observation project. One of my favorites.

✨Foyle’s War - procedural crime drama following DCS Foyle and hsi team as he solves murders in wartime Britain. Another favorite.

Island at War - Wartime life on the Channel Islands during the German occupation

Land Girls - Follows the lives of a group of Land Girls working on an estate farm.

Bomb Girls - Follows the lives of a group of workers in a Toronto munitions factory.

Home Fires - Life in a small British town near an air base. Based on a book.

World On Fire - Follows the disparate lives of several people in several countries as the war begins.

✨All Creatures Great and Small - The life of Yorkshire Vet James Herriot, based on the book series of the same title. A favorite, both the 1970s original and the 2020 version.

A French Village - Daily life in a French village is upended as the Germans invade. Follows the same village through the entire war.

My Mother and Other Strangers - An Irish village deals with the introduction of an American Air Force base.

Colditz - life in one of the war's most infamous POW camps. Features Damian Lewis!!

Atlantic Crossing - the life of Crown Princess Marta of Norway as she tries to advocate for her country while living in the United States.

The Halycon - Life in a posh London hotel during the 1940s

Spies and Science:

X Company - Canadian drama about life overseas for spies

Resistance - French wartime drama about a woman in the French underground movement

Restless - Postwar drama about a woman who spied for the Russians in England during the war.

✨Manhattan - If you liked Oppenheimer, have I got a show for you!! Follows the lives of several scientists and their families as they move to Los Alamos. A favorite.

✨The Heavy Water War - Norwegian/British operations Grouse and Gunnerside to destroy German heavy water plant. A favorite.

The Twelfth Man - Norwegian sabotage operation gets shot down in occupied Norway.

✨Generation War - German experience of war from variety of perspectives. This show is excellent. Everyone should watch this.

✨SAS: Rogue Heroes - Follows the foundation of a parachute regiment in North Africa that would eventually become the basis for Britain's commando units. A favorite.

Postwar:

A Place to Call Home - very soapy Australian post-war drama about an upperclass family.

Our Wonder Years - Follows three sisters in post-war Germany as they attempt to confront the past.

Tannbach - Follows a family whose German town is split in two along the new East-West border.

The Defeated - Crime drama following a policeman trying to find his brother in post-war Berlin

Small Island- a Jamaican woman moves to London after the war and tries to adjust to a country that doesn't want her there

Call the Midwife - Social drama in the 1960s addressing the health and lives of the post-war poor of London.

[bleedingcoffee42]

Part 4- Replacements

Wishlist for things that should have made the show.

Speirs did a radio interview in England as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds from Carentan and it was broadcasted during Victory Parade of Spotlight bands. His parents, sister were hosted by Coca Cola and Toll House back home to listen to it. I'd love to hear this. He comes back from the hospital and is assigned to S-2 and then ends up swimming across the river in Holland by himself a few times and gets shot in the ass. Please, let this man fulfill the prophecy of being a Easy Company man, by showing him washed up on shore wounded in "The best place to get shot."

In Carentan, Clancy Lyall runs straight into a German's bayonet and got stuck on it as bayonets tend to do when skewering. Lyall shoots first and the German fell backwards pulling the bayonet out. After getting morphined by himself and at least three other people, he's sent back to England and in the hospital and hears "loud Scottish brogue" and it ends up being his frickin Dad! Merchant marine that got torpedoed and was being treated for hypothermia. Gave him a Luger Luz gave him, Dad was thrilled.

Okay, I admit I just want more Spiers, but come on. In Eindhoven his guys were laughing at him because a hot lady kissed him so hard and long he turned red with embarrassment. We need this.

This when Buck and Nix have their "I hate Jocks!" Conversation. And Buck has do PT in O.D.s because Nix is a petty bitch. Please.

Lieutenant Brewer. He's the guy who walked out and got shot by a sniper. Well, he survives but everyone was like "Oh this dude is a goner" and said it out loud. Give us that. Give us Buck Taylor who sees Brewer face down in the grass and says "Let's get moving, Brewer's finished." and Brewer hears him. And Al Mampre is even worse, he takes one look at the guy who is pale as hell and is like "Lieutenant, are you still alive? Because if you're not, I'm leaving." He ends up being one of Buck's friends who he's been told is dead TWICE only to walk in and see the guy just chillin. Got hit between the eyes in Carentan, they said he was dead and Buck sees him in Aldbourne. Then in Holland he's told he's dead and sees him reading a book in the hospital in Oxford! Flesh this guy out. He's been 'killed' twice and ends up going to work for the CIA, dude could be more.

Clancy Lyall ended up in a Heineken beer factory. He also watches the Brits get out of the tanks and have tea. Every damned day. Winters gets pissed about it. Let us see him pissed.

Shifty debating if he wants to take out Germans who are escorting American prisoners.

Guth has a parachute malfunction , hits hard and ends up paralyzed. Medics take him to a barn and he wakes up to see his hometown doctor! Goes to the hospital but they don't operate and eventually he rejoins Easy even though he could have been discharged but wants to be back with the guys.

Nix and Dick climbing the church tower in Uden. Dick runs down grabs a squad and intercepts a German squad, runs them off, then he goes back to the tower. He and Nix just casually watch the Luftwaffe and tanks hammer Vachel. He comments that he can't believe nobody is trying to take them out. Cue smirks, smiles....the Germans finally sending a shot at them and hitting the bell above their damned heads. They fly down the tower then laugh about it. GOD do I want this scene.

Dick looking for a new CP and coming across a tank and no guards on duty. Pissed he goes inside and sees a British guy eating eggs with a local girl and the guy asks if his tank is still outside? Dick is PISSED, go off buddy. Then he goes to the tavern across the street and Welsh is ON the bar. Dick is chill though, "We had different priorities" but the check point was set up.

[twopoppies]

heyy, i think my ask got lost but:

regarding the rob stringer ask that you answered, i was wondering why is rob stringer such a big deal.? also, this kinda got me intrigued, curious and angry(blacklisting of louis from uk radio) so i went on to research for myself and i fumbled upon this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51360192

it was the very first article that showed up, i didn't even need to dig, and it's directly by BBC, so is this BBC not the same as BBC radio or what..?

it's a little confusing for me cuz in my country nobody really pays any mind to radios and what they are playing and we usually stay tuned to our fave artists via tv shows, social media or simply music apps etc etc

Hi love. Rob Stringer is “a big deal” because he was head of Columbia when 1D were together and then head of Sony (parent company of Columbia) when Harry went solo (and Louis got stuck with Syco). So he’s had his fingers all over whatever contracts were signed by all of the guys, and most likely had plenty of decision making power over the closeting of HL and the blocking of Louis’ solo career.

BBC Radio and BBC TV are both divisions of the British Broadcasting Company. Louis having that disastrous interview on the Morning Show wasn’t the beginning of his being blocked from BBC radio. I think his blacklisting and image damage extends as far back as XFactor and Simon Cowell. There are many people involved and I don’t know if you can really point a finger at Simon or Rob Stringer and say that’s this is the key person responsible for it all. But, him appearing on that show and that article being written is just part of a very complex pattern of abuse he’s been subject to.

As for radio being important… I really don’t know why it seems to make a difference. I do think being nominated for The Brits or The Grammys doesn’t have without radio airplay and even if we know The Grammys are bullshit, it’s still great advertising and it’s still seen as prestigious in that you’re “accepted” by the music industry insiders.

But I think when people complain about him being blacklisted, they mean that he’s almost entirely absent from everything—radio for sure, but also radio concert events like Jingle Bell Ball/Summertime Ball, British talk shows like Graham Norton etc., British award shows (even the Rolling Stone UK award show was tainted by his performance being removed and his interview being publicized using Harry’s name).

I don’t buy into a lot of the stuff some solo fans talk about in terms of Louis’ career blockades, but for an artist who has such an ardent fanbase to be shut out of so many ways of advancing his career, you can’t help but assume there’s something underhanded happening.

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Someone has made playlists with radio recordings of news and speeches of WWII, year by year, and while I could talk to you about how listening to these gives a much better sense of the passage of time and the order of events and such, I'm coming instead to tell you about the silly point that is that in the 40s apparently it was NOT the custom to use acronyms for radio stations.

No one talks about the BBC, everyone talks about the British Broadcasting Corporation. And this is how I learned CBS stands for Columbia Broadcasting System, and NBC for National Broadcasting Company.

[vtuberconfessions]

Froot has now lost over thousands of her loyal twitter followers after she posted these fake screen shot edited posts, compare it to the badly edited screenshot of Froot saying the racist N word and you notice both of them are blurry and poorly edited like her 90 google page documentary screenshots. Froot's ex husband has a captured facebook image page where the screenshot shows a drawing from Froot portraying her self insert self hugging her Ex arriving from home. If you look at AntHimeCh's youtube video she has an interview with Froot's cheated to ex boyfriend. I will not mention his name out of respect for his privacy. You will know of his name once you watch AntHimeCh's Froot Mistakes documentary video upload where it shows AntHimeCh having a Skype Call interview with that cheated to ex boyfriend. I no longer see Froot as tolerable anymore to overlook since I did not want to damage VShojo's standing. But since Ironmouse, Matarakan, HimeHajime were willing to ignore how this will badly affect truly good soul vtubers like HarukaKaribu, Ksonchou, HenyatheGenius formerly Pikamee, MichiMochivee. Ksonchou and MichiMochivee have psychological health problems with Ksonchou admitting she suffers severe depression in one of her streams and MichiMochivee receiving mental health counseling from VShojo. HenyatheGenius currently sick from covid and uses VShojo and other Vtubers as a comfort since she still gets bullied to this very day by JK Rowling haters even under her new alias to this day, just for playing Hogwarts Legacy previously as Pikamee. HarukaKaribu has been an outcast who has been bullied for her autism and seeks Vtubers she can relate to for the sake of their friendship. They were all sacrificed so Froot in her hubris point of view believes she can get away selling off her remaining merchandise if she appeals to the far left crowd like The British Broadcast Channel and Modern Day Disney Company would. I want to tell you all that phones back around 2012 to 2016 do not take blurry screenshots. Those dated phones can capture screenshots clean as day. Froot is making it look like her cellphone was primitive back in the day it took blurry screenshots.

I'm not done for Mythic Talent got caught in the crossfire of hate when they defended Froot including with the innocent maiden Camila, she got threatened by one of the 4channers from the POLitically incorrect group who deeply hate Froot's guts. POLitically incorrect 4chan members took down one of Ironmouse's youtube channel in response to her defending Froot. Froot did not give an absolute shit she got her Vshojo friends and Mythic Talent friends caught in this tornado wind of a situation she started and does not feel bad about it at all. Froot is rather casual about it like nothing disastrous happened about it after. She thinks it was a triumphant yes queen moment on her part. MommaOcco has information about the Froot situation on her underthetea podcast youtube channel. On MommaOcco's twitter account she has shown one of Asmongold's livestreams about Froot where Asmongold shows how bad the situation has gotten. Since Asmongold is one of Vshojo's bigger endorsers, Froot will be put into even bigger lengths of pressure where they will eventually have to fire her. MommaOcco reveals Froot was acting like a saleswoman trying to pitch in her nsfw sexualized merchandise after she did the whole google 90 page document fiasco. Do not forget this. Owners of vtuberconfessions blog can you please screenshot this for preservation purposes?

.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

since the end of world war two - which was a reset as the world was devastated by war and shocked about the holocaust and other atrocities committed by nazi germany and the axis powers - the usa (in no particular order):

had segregation until only around 50 years ago despite taking the moral high ground for beating the racist nazis

granted immunity to nazis and actively recruited nazi scientists

declared the war on communism costing hundreds of thousands of lives and ravaging vietnam as well as funding islamistic terrorism as a countermeasure

then declaring the war on terrorism after the war on communism backfired with 9/11 costing another thousands if not millions of lives with devastating consequences for countries like afghanistan

destabilised and hindered democracy in several countries and regions that still deal with the consequences today such as venezuela

declared the war on drugs but also had a cia funded crack epidemic

have built a wall on the mexican but not the canadian border

spent billions over billions for military and other operations to control other countries and have the most power on a global scale while many of the population cant even afford healthcare and live in very precarious situations or even without housing due to the unwillingness to regulate corporations and grant better workers and tenants rights

refuse to regulate big corporations and let technology companies grow unchecked which is kind of ruining the internet

claim to hate religious fundamentalism when its about islam while evangelicals are one of the most powerful political groups and fundamentalists are allowed to homeschool and isolate their kids

abused the jews wish for their own country to install the state of israel for control in the middle east, funding displacement and systematic cleansing of palestinians with the help of the british

still systematically discriminate against the native population and leave them in a vulnerable position leading to a huge issue with kidnapping, trafficking and unsolved murders of native girls and women

has almost 5 % of its population incarcerated who then are not allowed to vote with 30 % of the female prison population being prostitutes

have a sham democracy run by billionaires and reagan is mainly responsible for undoing social progress by enforcing neoliberalism and lying about trickle down effects

have no public broadcast and all news sources are privatised

still have the death penalty and abortion bans in some states

probably a shit ton more im forgetting now

yet usamericans have the gull to get on a high horse and point fingers at other countries because what? a european was mean online? lmao. and what gets me the most is that they often couldnt even name the president or point out said countries on a map.

people joke about the usa because they have made themselves out to be land of the free, the best country in the world, the worlds cop, the poster child democracy, while miserably failing their own people, immigrants following the promise set by the usa for a better life, and every country that was unlucky enough to be invaded and destabilised by the us military and the cia. on top the usa have a hegemonic grip on the majority of the globe and export culture wars and propaganda through hollywood movies and shows especially to other western countries. so give me a break

[scarred-serafina-fan]

Willa TV Project – Robert Beatty Books

I was avoiding posting about this until I saw something a little more official but it's a whole page on his official website so I guess that's as official as it gets

But basically they are finally adapting his books to the screen the company that he is teamed up is surprisingly entertainment one not disney who owns the rights also it's just willa that's being adapted not serafina for reasons I'm not very clear on

Anyways this whole thing is just odd even beyond the whole serafina is not being adapted they're straight cutting to book four of the series and disney doesn't seem to have much if anything to do with it

For a little context in the south within a certain vicinity of ashville (like reaching into other states) the serafina series was marketed HARD everyone knew about it and was supporting it this whole tv show deal tho has been very quiet I've only really seen rumblings of it from the far corners of the internet

They also said in that link above filming locations are not determined yet and this is just me speculating but it does not sound like they are planning on filming it in the smoky mountains again odd that whole area is pretty popular for film projects even hunger games filmed in the Appalachian Mountains so I hope they're gonna film there but idk again I haven't heard ANYTHING

But finally I want to talk about the group that's making it Entertainment One with Amy Adam's Bond Group Entertainment

Entertainment One is kinda interesting when I started looking into them they have things like Peppa Pig dungeons and dragons and insidious they apparently started as a music distributing company that made the switch to movie distribution a few years later and in 2016 a British tv broadcaster ITV plc offered to buy them out for $1.3 bill which they rejected because it was "fundamentally undervalued" the whole time they are pretty much acquiring different other smaller companies left and right and they have a large investment in Quibi I guess? But in mid 2019 Hasbro brought announced that they were apparently acquiring Entertainment one for $4 bill (according to Wikipedia) when hasbro obtained them tho it seems they started making plenty of cuts like laying 10% of it's film and television staff (again number is from Wikipedia) and many branches of the company were straight up closed and by 2022 has brought announced they were planning on selling the company to lionsgate but by the time deal closed last December Entertainment one had already closed its distributing branches in most countries including England and lionsgate bought their assets for $500 mill so safe to say is a dying company that probably won't even last long enough for this project to happen (they were also split into three different separate companies)

Amy Adam's Bond Group Entertainment on the other hand is interesting in a different way according to deadline the company will work mostly with best selling book ip yeah "WILL" seems like this company has not done a whole lot yet the company was only even first launched in 2019 deadline also lists off willa of the wood as one of the things they have in development yeah the show that has basically no buzz is named as one of the biggest things they have in development the company has also very obvious been relying on the name of Amy Adam's so far I mean there's a whole paragraph about her specifically in link to Robert beattys website above

Idk just seems like they have these two companies one that's standing on its last leg and another that's just starting and they're starting halfway through the series it's just odd I'm not letting my hopes up yet because honestly I'll just be happy if it ever even comes out I first heard about this thing a WHILE ago and it's been pretty quite so who knows

[denimbex1986]

'Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan has said he "absolutely" will not work on another film until the Hollywood strikes are resolved.

Tens of thousands of Hollywood actors have joined writers in taking industrial action, because they want streaming giants to agree to a fairer split of profits and better working conditions.

The Screen Actors Guild also wants to protect actors from being usurped by digital replicas.

Nolan admitted he was "very fortunate with the timing", as his film's premieres were held just before the strike began, meaning Oppenheimer would not be affected by industry members stopping work.

When asked if he would write another film during the strike, he told BBC Culture editor Katie Razzall: "No, absolutely. It's very important that everybody understands it is a very key moment in the relationship between working people and Hollywood.

"This is not about me, this is not about the stars of my film," the acclaimed director, writer and producer added.

"This is about jobbing actors, this is about staff writers on television programmes trying to raise a family, trying to keep food on the table."

As more production companies use streaming platforms - like Netflix and Amazon Prime - for their shows, it has changed how actors and writers get paid.

Previously every time an episode was re-run on a TV network, it would tend to involve payment, allowing those who worked on projects to get by in between jobs.

The director said the companies involved had not yet "accommodated how they're going to in this new world of streaming, and a world where they're not licensing their products out to other broadcasters - they're keeping them for themselves".

Nolan, who was Oscar-nominated five times for the films Dunkirk, Inception and Memento, added: "They have not yet offered to pay appropriately to the unions' working members, and it's very important that they do so.

"I think you'd never want a strike, you never want industrial action.

"But there are times where it's necessary. This is one of those times."

Speaking ahead of the London premiere, where several of Oppenheimer's stars left the red carpet early to strike, he explained: "It's very important to bear in mind that there are people who have been out of work for months now, as part of the writers strike, and with the actors potentially joining - a lot of people are going to suffer."

Despite the row in California, British-born Nolan has no current plans to work more in the UK, his home country, as he prefers to be "on the real locations" where his films are set.

"The UK has wonderful film studios," he explained. "It's a great place to come to shoot a film if you're going to be on sound stages."

Oppenheimer tells the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic Manhattan Project scientist, who had a leading role in developing the atomic bomb that made him a "destroyer of worlds".

He "gave us the power to destroy ourselves and that had never happened before", Nolan said.

Commissioned by the US Government during World War II, and believing themselves in a nuclear race with the Nazis over who would create the bomb first, in 1945 scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico detonated a test bomb, codenamed Trinity.

Their invention was then used, controversially, to end the war, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to devastating effect.

The film is an exploration not just of Oppenheimer's story, but of the "incredible decision" the scientists took on that first occasion.

"There's a possibility that when you push that button, you might destroy the entire world," Nolan told the BBC.

"And yet they went ahead and they pushed it. How could you make that decision? How could you take that on yourself?"

Another existential threat to civilization is AI, which is also part of the Hollywood strike and makes the Oppenheimer movie more timely.

"One of the interesting things about putting this film out is it's coming at a time when there are a lot of new technologies that people start to worry about the unintended consequences," he said.

"When you talk to leaders in the field of AI, as I do from time to time, they see this moment right now as their Oppenheimer moment. They're looking to his story to say, 'what are our responsibilities? How can we deal with the potential unintended consequences?' Sadly, for them, there are no easy answers."

Nolan is one of a rare number of Hollywood directors. His films - Interstellar, the Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception amongst them - are both blockbusters and arthouse fare; critically acclaimed and, Tenet aside, which was released during the pandemic, box office successes.

"I make the films that I really want to go to the cinema and sit down with my popcorn and watch" he says. "I started making films when I was a kid. I made Super 8 films from when I was seven or eight years old and I've never stopped".

He's a champion of the big screen who, famously, left Warner Bros for rival Universal to make Oppenheimer.

Nolan's known for wanting his films to feel authentic rather than computer-generated.

There was even a rumour doing the rounds on the internet that he had set off a real atomic bomb in New Mexico for Oppenheimer.

"We recreated the circumstances of it," he said, "obviously not using an atomic weapon. What we're trying to portray is this moment of absolute beauty and absolute terror.

"This is the moment that really changed the world."'

[reluctantjoe]

Mathew Baynton on life after Ghosts

Shilpa Ganatra interviews Mathew Baynton, who explains why it’s time to end the BBC One sitcom and how new voices are improving TV comedy

“What have we done?” bemoans the decapitated head of Sir Humphrey Bone, after the nation’s favourite spectres make a defining decision in the final episode of Ghosts, which goes out as a Christmas special on BBC One. “We did the right thing,” Julian Fawcett, the trouserless MP ghost, says confidently.

The exchange nicely reflects the sentiment of the show’s creators, the Them There collective, in deciding to exorcise the BBC supernatural sitcom after five series – despite notching up several RTS nominations and maintaining an audience of around 4 million throughout its run.

The Christmas special was co-written by Them There’s Mathew Baynton, who also plays the romantic poet Thomas Thorne in the series.

“From an artistic point of view, I’ve never been in any doubt that ending Ghosts now was the right thing to do and the right time to do it,” he tells Television. “From a personal point of view, we feel a sense of loss that we’re not going to be getting together in that place at the same time of year, every year. But nothing can go on for ever.”

“That sadness tells you it was the right thing. If we carried on for another five seasons and we were all bored of it, bored of each other, and it wasn’t as good as it used to be, we wouldn’t miss it afterwards.”

The series follows in the tradition of British domestic sitcoms, centring on a young couple, Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe). They inherit Button House, a country manor haunted by a disparate crew of spirits from across the ages, played by the Them There collective: Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond, plus Lolly Adefope.

The show is a logical leap from the troupe’s first multi-award-winning TV creation, Horrible Histories, which re-enacted the curiosities of yesteryear in comedic skits. Horrible Histories’ success made it “shockingly easy” to get Ghosts commissioned – the only bump in the road was discussions between the group and the BBC about the pilot.

Recalls Baynton: “They wanted to do a pilot that would go out with other pilots. We wanted to do one to figure out the idea and road test the special effects, but we didn’t want it to be aired, because then there would be a pressure to not change it.”

The compromise was to make a 10-minute taster pilot that wasn’t for broadcast. This taster tried out their initial idea of having a house full of different ghosts and playing multiple characters (as with Horrible Histories and Them There’s Sky One series, Yonderland). But the result proved this set-up didn’t create the character friction necessary to sustain a sitcom, so the band stuck to the small group of ghosts we know today, from a prim and proper Edwardian matriarch to a caveman.

As Ghosts meets its end – on British TV at least, as the US adaptation is still going strong and about to enter its third season – Baynton, who turns in a high-octane performance as Fickelgruber in the film Wonka, is turning his attention to the other strings in his bow.

At the end of January he’ll step into the role of Bottom in a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He’s also writing a comedy film (details are being kept under wraps) and will show off his more serious acting side in the upcoming BBC Three series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, a crime thriller based on the bestselling novel.

As a student, Baynton initially studied directing, earning a first-class degree at the Rose Bruford drama school in south-east London. After being drawn towards comedy, he attended Philippe Gaulier’s famously idiosyncratic clown school in Paris. “We used to say half of the fee is like a ticket just to watch him, because he’s hilarious. He plays the persona of a curmudgeonly, philo­sophical, French sort of half-wizard,” he recalls, adding: “Philippe’s got an incredible ability to help you learn what the audience sees in you.”

“If people tried to act up an idiot character, he’d say, ‘Don’t pretend to be more of an idiot than God already made you. He did a good enough job’. You don’t need to exaggerate it or pretend to look stupid. What you need to be is honest about the thing about yourself that people find funny, and then access that and allow people to laugh at it.”

This advice helped Baynton climb his first rungs in TV comedy to play Deano in Gavin & Stacey, a work colleague of Smithy (James Corden). He would go on to co-create and write the RTS award-­winning The Wrong Mans with Corden, the co-author of Gavin & Stacey. By the time Ghosts began, he had worked in TV comedy – featuring in Peep Show, Spy and The Armstrong and Miller Show, among others – for more than a decade.

“You’ll hear people saying, ‘Comedy was best when I was young’. I always think, ‘Well, you’re just not paying attention, then’. There will always be great stuff and if it doesn’t speak to you, it’s probably because it’s for people younger than you.”

While being a dad of two has limited the amount of competitor benchmarking he’s doing, he’s impressed with the greater breadth of voices in contemporary TV comedies.

“Bridget Christie’s The Change springs to mind, with menopausal women as the central characters, and the specificity of the location of the Forest of Dean. You couldn’t say that’s like any sitcom that’s come before,” he says. “We Are Lady Parts is another one, so is Stath Lets Flats.”

“I don’t know why I’m only naming Channel 4 shows, seeing as the BBC has been so good to me…”

Making comedy inclusive is no constraint to a writer, Baynton believes: “I’ve read the odd interview where people have said that creators are self-censoring to the point where they can’t be as instinctively funny. And some people see comedy’s function as being able to say the unsayable.”

“I can only speak for myself, but I know that my best work comes from writing and rewriting. What emerges is always something cleverer than I am, because in life you only get a first draft when you’re having a conversation. It’s not a bad thing to realise that a joke could maybe hurt someone, and it sounds like a better idea that I should rewrite if my intention could be misconstrued.”

As the curtain falls on Ghosts, commissioners are clamouring to find out what’s next for the Them There collective. Happily, they still have the same personnel and are mulling over their next project.

“We’re mindful that we can’t just do a modern sitcom where we’re wearing jeans and T-shirts. It just isn’t our tone,” says Baynton. “When we look for ideas, we’re thinking, what’s the playground that we can put ourselves in? Where we can do something with a heightened silliness, where potentially we play more than one character, and where there is a costume element to it.”

With this tried and tested formula as the base, their continued success seems assured. The legacy of Ghosts is preserved, too, persisting in the corridors of Button House and, indeed, TV history.

[fatehbaz]

After the closure of their flagship shopping location in Winnipeg in 2020, what’s going on with Canada’s beloved retail department store, the former fur trade monopoly leader, once a central force in the British Empire’s control of North America, the Hudson’s Bay Company? The empire lives on, continuing to control land through Canadian and US real estate companies. Liquidating real estate can keep the money and keep the land in the same hands.

Regarding the decline of the oldest European company in North America, and “new” manifestations of imperialist conceptions of land: I wanted to summarize the reporting work of Don Gillmor, in an article for The Walrus published in January 2023. (Credit to Gillmor for piecing together these threads of thought and framing the story, here.)

So the “oldest company in North America” is the Hudson’s Bay Company. After chartering in the 1670s, HBC “owned” vast stretches of land and was central to British and later Canadian control of “the West,” and then enjoyed decades of celebration in the twentieth century as a retail department store chain. HBC’s flagship store in Winnipeg was finally closed in November 2020. At the time, commercial real estate firms “valued the building at $0.” As Gillmor puts it: “Millions of Canadians grew up with the Hudson’s Bay Company as a place to buy towels and clothes, but land has always been at the heart of HBC. Canada’s oldest company began as a land deal (at least from the European perspective) during an outbreak of the bubonic plague and may end as a real estate deal in another plague.”

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In 2022, as part of what many observers and some Indigenous critics considered a superficial public relations campaign, HBC “gifted” the 500,000 square-foot downtown Winnipeg building to the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, an “alliance of southern First Nations communities in Manitoba.” Critics haven’t all been impressed.

Here, Gillmor cites some local commentary: “[A]n episode of Media Indigena, a podcast broadcast from Winnipeg by journalist Rick Harp, [...] offered another perspective. A guest, Kenneth Williams, an assistant professor with the University of Alberta’s department of drama, suggested that, as reparations, it wasn’t enough. HBC exploited Indigenous people for centuries [...]. And the Winnipeg store was ground zero for this trade, with the largest fur storage facility in western Canada, a vault that could hold 12,000 furs. Williams suggested ‘the inspired act of reclamation’ was merely HBC getting rid of a toxic asset.”

Current HBC governor and chairman, Richard Baker, seems to be purposely liquidating HBC’s assets, to cash out, so to speak. In a 2020 interview, Baker said: “We’re not a department store chain. We’re a holding company that owns many billions of dollars of real estate.”

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Since inception, it been all about land.

So the “company’s roots can be traced back to 1665″ when Pierre-Espirit Radisson traveled to London to ask for the financial backing of King Charles II. This was the same year that up to one-fifth of London’s population had died during an outbreak of bubonic plague. By 1670, King Charles II “granted the charter that started the Hudson’s Bay Company, but the ownership of the land was largely an abstraction. He had no idea of its size and viewed it as a commodity. [...] The imbalance of power meant that the colonizer’s mercantile philosophies” including apparent human detachment from and lordship over land “became the foundation” for British imperial power in Canada.

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In 1867, “the Dominion of Canada was formed, but much of the west was still controlled by HBC.” In that same year, “the Americans bought Alaska from the Russians,” and so, to compete with the United States, both the British government and infamous Canadian prime minister Macdonald pressured HBC to sell much of western North America to the Canadian government at a discount price, giving Canada so-called “ownership” of a massive stretch of land "twice the size of Alaska.”

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And now, the chairman of HBC is cashing out. And the Empire’s found new ways to mask its activities while still keeping land in the same hands.

According to Gillmor: “In 2012, he took the company public and acquired the upscale department store Saks [...]. In March 2020, [...] Baker won his bid to take the company private once more [...]. In Canada, the last of the big homegrown department stores (Simpson’s, Eaton’s, Sears, and Zellers) were all gone. In the US, Macy’s was closing stores; Neiman Marcus, Barneys, JCPenney had all filed for bankruptcy [...]. Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University and a former CEO of Sears Canada, saw it as a thinly veiled strategy to strip the assets of HBC so only the real estate remained [...]. ‘It’s a ­financial play,’ he said, ‘which gives him the ability to manipulate the real estate assets of Hudson’s Bay, both in Canada and the US.’ [...] ‘Baker will liquidate the Bay,’ Cohen predicted. ‘He will liquidate.’ If he does -- its Bay Days sales and Stanfield underwear finally gone -- all that will be left will be the land. Currently, it is controlled by deeds, leaseholds, and leases that are shared by Baker, venture capitalists, equity partners [...].”

Meaning that the future of the HBC stores and other properties across North America remains similar to the initial colonization project. Again from Gillmor: “[T]his version of the land echoes that of the seventeenth century: its ownership [...] complex [...] and profiting someone in another country.”

Land profited kings. Land now profits CEOs and venture capitalists and property management companies.

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All quotes above were excerpted from Gillmor’s article: Don Gillmor. “Why Hudson’s Bay Company’s Future Is in Question.” The Walrus. 4 January 2023. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Related.

In an article from October 2020, on the eve of the Winnipeg store’s closure, Manitoba-based reporter Niigaan Sinclair offered some commentary. Following quote from: Niigaan Sinclair. “Right place, right time: Downtown Bay building a monument to colonization’s brutality, but it could be transformed into a place of Indigenous positvity, reconciliation.” Winnipeg Free Press. 5 October 2020.

Three-and-a-half centuries after Hudson’s Bay Co. received its first charter -- giving Prince Rupert and his “Company of Adventurer’s of England” an exclusive trading monopoly over the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin -- it’s biggest symbol of colonization is coming to an end. [...] [T]he company plans to close its six-storey flagship store at Portage Avenue and Memorial Boulevard, literally Canada’s gateway to the West. So this is how colonization ends. The people who profit the most take all they can from the land and people within it, and then quietly leave when there’s nothing left to take. Soon, all that will be left is an empty [...] pile of plaster and metal that will cost millions to repair or remove for those who actually live here. Really, though, this is how colonization continues. HBC is not a retail empire -- never really was -- but a massive real estate company. Just as King Charles II gave Prince Rupert lands that were not his to give, HBC holds deeds to billions of dollars of global property [...] and will march on. [...] HBC’s legacy of exploitation, violence and theft is permanent, though. HBC began with profits from the slave trade and cheap goods from the British colonies. It was instrumental in manufacturing goods for the Commonwealth [...]. Alongside were billions built off Indigenous lands and resources.

[corwly]

reading bbc as british broadcasting company on first glance exclusively really tells a lot about what was exposed to me too young