I, I DID Survive no comments

Actually that was better than I expected, if only because something happened in it.

[Aside: Something Happened is a novel by Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22; look it up on Google but expect the likes of Amazon and worse to predominate in the results. Must dig out my copy of Closing Time when I've got some.]

Let's be fair: it is improving . . . but it will have to keep doing so at at least this rate in order to qualify as 'passable'. It'll really have to pull the stops out to do justice to the original in my memory. I still can't bring myself to care about who lives or dies.

Did I ever copy those original series videos to DVD? I have misgivings about going back and watching them - I fear it will seem awfully creaky. It's the old problem that I remember the original version being bleakly brilliant (or brilliantly bleak) . . . but at the time the production values were current, and television technology has improved a lot since then.

Conversely I still have to get over such crass ploys as Abby pointing out that salesmen were "desperate to get into her knickers" in order to establish how sexy she is - before examining the lumps in her armpits. Perhaps it was supposed to be irony.

One has to wonder why all the media were using the "European Flu" label for an illness that causes buboes, an obvious hark back to historical plagues with a non-influenza symptom. It doesn't quite gel as a dig at the paranoia over Asian and Avian flu. [Late entry: swine flu.]

I'm not worried about Avian flu: I'm never going to Avia.