All entries for Saturday 29 August 2009

Quick catch up

A couple of reviews I’ve done for 4ortherecord.com

Gavin Osborn’s Meeting Your Heroes

Jim Bob’s Goffam

And if you’re bemoaning the lack of any Edinburgh coverage this year, well I wasn’t there so in short: yay for Peter Buckley Hill finally getting that Spirit of the Fringe award for the Free Fringe, I have no clue about the rest of the winners, I’ve only ever seen one person on the short-list. I can only presume Tim Key is much better live than on Screenwipe – hopefully a tour will be forthcoming later in the year so I can see for myself.

For other stuff, go read Anna who has loads of reviews, video blogs and all sorts. Next year dammit!

Dean Love : 29 Aug 2009 23:15 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On Sexton Blake, Jonathan Nash, and 90s Videogames Magazines

I’ve recently been telling anyone that will listen to check out the new BBC Radio 2 comedy series The Adventures Of Sexton Blake. Sexton Blake is a fictional detective once described as the missing link between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, that’s been around for over a hundred years and written for by over two hundred different writers. Each writer tends to put their own spin on Blake, with no regard for continuity or past stories. Some tales are serious, some are funny, most involve a good punch-up at some point. The latest BBC version is very much on the humorous side, fusing a old-fashioned radio drama style with a very modern approach to comedy, and it’s one of the best things BBC Radio have done in years.

So with all this eulogising, I have something of a confession to make. I’d never heard of Sexton Blake until around a month ago. And I still haven’t heard, seen, or read anything outside of this new series. See, what got my attention wasn’t the name Sexton Blake, but the names Mil Millington and Jonathan Nash. You might have heard of the first one: there was a rather successful book and Guardian column called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About that you might have heard of. Millington is very good, hence my mentioning him here as I’m about to completely ignore him in favour of talking about Jonathan Nash.

Firstly, no, he’s not the mathematician that Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind. There’s a small chance you might be aware of his work (with Millington) on The Weekly , a short-lived website best summed-up as the British version of The Onion. And when I say ‘British’ I mean quintessentially British in a hugely stereo-typical way, and a great example of the sort of hugely stylised work that Nash does best.

But for me, I first encountered his work when I was about ten. I owned a Sinclair Spectrum computer, and I liked to read. So my parents bought me a subscription to Your Sinclair magazine, which in its later years was edited by Nash. After the magazine closed I finally threw out the Spectrum and bought an Amiga computer, and this time the magazine was the games-focused Amiga Power. It was here, in my teens, that the first few written voices really started to stand out for me. Amongst all the hugely competent but straight-forward games reviews, I started to notice the names of a couple of writers that did something more. First was Stuart Campbell, who’s bile-filled dismemberments of any game that dared to be mediocre also managed to be hugely funny. Secondly there was a writer who was equally funny but in a far more subtle way. Jonathan Nash’s reviews would always give you something different. He practically invented the notion of the concept review in video-gaming. To give you some examples, here’s space shooty game Alien Breed reviewed as a movie pitch, this is top-down adventure Dreamweb reviewed mostly with the words “Oh dear”, a review of vampire adventure Bloodnet where he uses the phrase “it looks like a row of spikes on a tachycardiac sugar-fiend’s electrocardiograph machine”.

The point being, it was the first time I’d ever encountered genuinely stylised writing. It introduced me to the idea that words could be entertaining through form as well as a function. Many aspiring writers of my generation talk about their passion stemming from reading their favourite NME writers in their teens, or discovering Hunter S Thomson at the local library. But for a small sub-section of us, the most nerdy of the nerds, our inspiration lay in the words of Messers Nash, Campbell, Farragher, Winstanley, Davis, et al. And of those, Nash’s voice was always the most distinct. I haven’t even touched on the non-game related features he worked on the later days of both Amiga Power and Your Sinclair. Or the fact that he was so unhappy that the page count of the latter magazine started to shrink to nothing in its final years that he started writing pages and pages of extra copy to put on the cover tape to be viewed teletext style on your Spectrum.

One of the strangest things of all is that he’s almost impossible to track down. Finding those examples of his work took an age. His own website, The House of Nash, used to host a bunch of stuff, but was taken down almost as soon as the internet started to get popular, and is strangely inaccessible on Archive.org. He’s left all the publicity for Sexton Blake to his co-writer, Mr Millington, who despite working with him on a number of projects, has never met him in the real world, and claims he doesn’t ever want to. Millington also calls him the “funniest living Britain”, and while I’m not sure I agree with him, it’s certainly a claim worth considering.

Dean Love : 29 Aug 2009 23:08 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem