Face-fooked, Saving The Cheerleader & Foreskins

Now, for longer than I probably care to remember, I've been part of what is generally known as social networking. I started out on MySpace and reluctantly defected to Facebook when I realised that everyone (and I mean everyone) I knew was there. Even my internet-phobic sister has succumbed to the lure of Facebook. So far I've managed to get back in touch with dozens of people I had thought lost to the ravages of time. People from secondary school; hell, people from junior school have crawled out of the woodwork, including some that I probably would have preferred to remain buried. But hey, it's only over the internet. It's not like you have to talk to them all the time. I've even made a couple of tentative friends completely at random thanks to the numerous applications Facebook offers. It's been an invaluable tool for staying in touch with people I've met on my trips to visit friends and it's much easier than e-mailing everyone all the time. If you want to know what someone's up to, you just pop over to their page and see. It's a work of genius, it really is.

It also might be a very dangerous tool. Admittedly, it's not as easy to stalk someone as it is on MySpace (where you don't even have to be friends with someone to read their blog, view their pics or stare a their profile for hours on end), but it's somehow all too easy to keep an eye on people. But maybe that's just the world i which we live today. The internet has changed the way we live our lives dramatically. Theoretically, it's now possible for me to do everything (bar work, and if I tried hard enough I could probably even find a job that I could do over the internet) from home. I don't ever have to leave, not even to do the shopping. And now, thanks to Facebook, I can even stay in touch with all my friends without ever having to leave the house. Shit, I could probably do it all from the comfort of my bed. Just think on that.

And while I'm here, let's have a little think about Heroes. The second series starts a week from tonight, still a little pariah over on BBC2, despite the huge ratings it got last year. That said, it took till the third series of The X Files (the last big mainstream sf hit from America) for it to be transferred to the main stage of BBC1, and there the ratings... stayed exactly the same. So does it really matter? Not really. BBC2 is no longer the shabbier, studenty younger brother of BBC1, a home for all the cult and minority interest stuff. That's what they have BBC4 for (BBC3 is obviously for endless repeats of Family Guy and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps). BBC2 is now, somehow, one of the Big 4 (Channel 5, or 'Five' as I think it's called these days never managed to break the Big 4's hold - the Big 4, in case you're wondering being BBC's 1 and 2, ITV (or ITV1 as it's dubbed these days) and Channel 4, all of which cater for slightly different needs), as evidenced by the fact that in the past year we've seen numerous Radio Times covers for shows like Heroes and Torchwood, and although the cover of the Radio Times is no longer the big thing that it used to be, it's still a fairly prestigious thing, like guest starring in Doctor Who in the 80's.

It's a good show (I'm back talking about Heroes now, in case you're a bit lost). I'm currently rewatching the first series (or Volume 1 - Genesis as the show's own mythology has it) thanks to the death of HD and therefore companies like Amazon offloading HD DVD stock like it's going out of fashion. Which it is, to be honest with you. But I have an HD DVD player and a whole bunch of HD DVD's (I also have a Blu-Ray player in my PS3 so I'm not too fussed about HD DVD going the way of Betamax) and I'm not ashamed of that fact. So I bought the HD box set of Heroes, despite the fact I bought the R1 box set of the bog standard DVD's when it first came out (and watched it over the course of a weekend). It's also a show very much of its time. The serial structure of TV (especially American action/drama TV) has been growing in stature since its inception with Babylon 5, although it took 24 and then Lost to really popularise the format. It's definitively post 9/11 (the central story behind Volume 1 has our mismatched heroes trying to foil the destruction of New York), like Battlestar Galactica (and if you need the 9/11 inspirations for that one pointed out your shoe size is probably bigger than your IQ) and like Galactica it takes a bunch of tropes that are so familiar as to be practically archetypes and turns them into living, breathing flesh and blood and then turns the intensity up to eleven. Insert Spinal Tap joke here.

Oviously, being based on the notion of superpowers, Heroes' inspirations are comics, but crucially this is a series which is damn serious. No one wears tights, has secret lairs or even a secret identity. Hiro, a fan favourite, is a nerd like us - in the first episode he's constantly makes allusions to Star Trek and gets his theory of time travel from X Men comics and he toyswith the idea of suiting up and adopting a secret identity, prompting his friend Ando to make a derogatory comment about tights. It's the same mindset which Joss Whedon adopted for Buffy (a superhero story with vampires) and his fingerprints on the initial X Men movie (he was responsible for the 'yellow spandex' line which, at the time seemed like the best way to do a superhero movie - to get it all away from the gaudy four colour splash pages of its origins, until Sam Raimi came along and did a Spider-Man movie so faithful to the spirit of the comic (if not the continuity) that it was as if he'd just ripped up a comic and pasted it to the screen) and it's a mindset that seems to be necessary for a show to receive mainstream acclaim. Galactica is forever being praised in the big outside world but they all downplay that face that, at heart, it's a show about a great big space ship and robots. They focus on the politics and the fact that - good god! - people shag each other on this show! It's the standard way to give sf a good review in the mainstream press (the standard way to give it a bad review is to focus not on the show, but on the fans, who are uniformly portrayed as sad anoraks, exclusively male and lacking social lives) because it essentially says 'this is good, despite the sf' instead of simply saying 'this is good sf' because the general public, that is, those people whose idea of far fetched plots doesn't stretch much further than Dirty Den coming back from the dead in EastEnders, doesn't like sf (or so the accepted logic goes; before the revival of Doctor Who and the massive success it's had, prompting the creation of a least a dozen other fantasy/sf shows, sf on TV was a dead genre, despite the fact that the biggest films are almost exclusively fantasy and sf). And so it is with Heroes. It's much harder, of course, to pretend that Heroes isn't sf than it is with say, Lost or Alias, but it has a lot going for it on that count.It's set in the present day, for a start, which excludes all of that awkward gubbins with spaceships and aliens (speaking of aliens, it's telling that even the new version of Galactica has yet to feature an alien race - they even made the Cylon's a product of human engineering rather than the soliders of a long dead reptillian race as they were in the seventies incarnation) and, a couple of the heroes aside (yes Hiro, I'm looking at you) their powers are pretty much low key - Claire's regeneration, DL's 'phasing' (I'm nicking the terminology from X Men here, because DL is essentially a fly version of Kitty Pryde), even Niki/Jessica's superstrength which is barely remarked upon. It's all stuff that isn't too out there, all stuff that the general audience will already be familiar with. And those powers which aren't are pretty thoroughly explained within the series itself (Peter's human spongey-ness, Hiro's ability to bend time and space).

It's accessible, and that's important these days. It's also a very intelligent program and would stand as a shining example of how smart regular viewers are when you give them a chance. Well, it would, but then a show like Flash Gordon comes along.

So, before I go, the 'foreskins' section of this entry. No, I'm not going to talk about circumcison, but censorship.

You see, this morning I got up and was watching That 70's Show on MTV. Now, it would have been about eight/nine in the morning. And they bleeped out the word foreskin. It's a peculiar double standard, when you can have characters talk about having sex but not mentio the word 'foreskin'. It also brings to mind that song by Wheatus, 'Teenage Dirtbag', which features the line 'her boyfriend's a dick' but then obscures the next line, or part of it anyway, which is 'he brings a gun to school'. Can you guess which part they censor? As James Toback once said, if you're goingto censor something, at least censor someon'e head getting lopped off. It's a strange world in which we live where you can see people getting killed on TV, but an erect penis (and certainly shots of actual vaginal penetration) is still strictly verboten. It's a depressing world, actually. You get the impression that people's priorities are a little fucked up.

And before I go, don't go and see Awake, that film with Anakin Skywalker and Sue Storm in. It's rubbish. I might have felt offended if it was a TV special. As a film it was just diabolical. Peace out.