The strange world of the Youtube Critic's Circle with Miss Marple

Somebody asked why this blog is not a youtube channel.  Well, apart from the fact I’m banned from youtube for reasons which are to this day as yet unexplained … I prefer the written word.  This blog isn’t serious it’s just a kind of dump of information that I can’t transform into real usable content like stand up material or fiction.  It’s a progenitor of ideas and a dumping ground in which to dump silly ideas rather than a finished product.  When you’re writing you explore a whole range of ideas and there are always a load of extraneous thoughts that you just don’t know what to do with.  So here are mine...

Also the problem with Youtube is it seems to me to be a place full of ideologues and critics (due to the lack of resources of its creators to make Hollywood blockbusters).

Take, for example, Science Fiction … Youtube has spawned a whole plethora of professional pop culture sci-fi critics who all think they’re the new Barry Norman of Sci-Fi.  Maybe some are...

Amongst the most well known is Nerdrotic...  This is a guy with a beard in the USA who used to run a comic book shop who sits surrounded by cartoon and TV franchise memorabilia and spends his time criticising writers and producers.  One of his favourite targets is Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who who he “lovingly describes as Dr Karen” – not being American it took me a long time to get the slang (see here).  Nerdrotic’s real name is Gary Buechler and to be fair to Gary he seems like a nice enough bloke.  He spouts his opinions, speculates on gossip and generally pushes his own agenda but then who doesn’t?  His redeeming quality is he seems to actually care about the franchises that he criticises and seems to want them to be better. 

However, he seems to blame all narrative and commercial failure on what we shall call – for want of a better cliché – “woke culture”.  For example Star Trek The Original Series or the Next Generation or whatever might be the gold standards for the Star Trek franchise and I have to admit I haven’t even bothered to watch Star Trek Discovery but like most critics he doesn’t really see them as a product of their time or of an individual creative mind.  

For the truth is Star Trek was the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry and Gene’s dead.  Everything since he died is therefore a reinterpretation, reboot, spin off or has some other gimmick in order to "perpetuate the franchise” (or as we used to call it milk the copyright cow).... someone must constantly think of new angles that are both different and yet the same.

Otherwise you may as well just repeat the old series and that was cancelled for a reason.  Nothing is forever... 

Gary doesn’t like the fact that the new Star Trek serieses (how many are there now?) seem more cynical but I can see how in today’s world – indeed, I could see a decade or two ago – how the original Star Trek was going to become problematic to some people.  For a start it’s a frontier story where the Kirk is the Sheriff and the Klingons are the Red Indians Native Americans or something.  The Federation doesn’t ruthlessly expand but it occasionally engages in some questionable ethics.  Indeed, Pickard to me often resembled not so much an adventurer as a minor civil servant - or perhaps the fusion between them.  He reminded me of a serman by a Priest decades ago who said that "In the Acts of the Apostles they convert thousands to Christianity a day and people ask why this doesn't happen anymore?  The answer is you stop being 'fishers of men' and start becoming keepers of a fish tank'."  One imagines that inevitably the huge empire that was the Federation would start having similar fishtank type problems... 

Since Star Trek started it was surely only a matter of time till someone started postulating “what if the federation was corrupt?”  Yes, it's an idealised future but drama is conflict.  If there's no corruption what is going to drive the plot? 

Of course  the idea of a corrupted Federation is entirely Terry Nation's Blakes 7 – which even goes so far as to take the federation logo and tilt it on its side … but that's another story...

I’m sure Gene wouldn’t have liked a lot of what they’re doing with Star Trek today (if I bothered to watch it) but....  Well, he’s dead. 

And when a writer dies no one continues their vision. 

That’s that’s the whole point of writing. 

YOU create your world. 

Thus you can see how the writers who’ve inherited these franchises seem to end up constantly at war with their audiences.  They want to tell their stories and the audiences want to be told the same stories.  Somewhere there’s a middle way but it all gets lost in the politics and shouting.  Of course if the writers really wanted total creative freedom they’d do what I do – write a novel alone where you’ve created all the characters and situations from first principles.  But even I have the odd editor who tells me what to do.  Or the odd promoter... “Please don’t swear mate the snowflake generation don’t like the word and will complain to the venue…” etc.  But, of course, there’s more money in writing for continuing franchises from sci-fi to soap opera to … whatever…

Gary Buechler isn’t the only such person, of course, he’s just my personal nightmare of who I might turn into…  there’s a whole array of such commentators including the more sweary and angry  Doomcock – a man in a mask who claims to review content from the perspective of an evil alien dictator - but who sounds more a Daily Mail reader... 

And “Heel vs Babyface” …a chubby middle aged man in a gamer’s chair who sounds like he listens to LBC and often finds what he's watching so disturbingly bad all he can do is cover his face and hang his head...  Sometimes they interview each other on each other’s channels too which is like The Three Doctors’ Critics' Circle… one expects Dorothy Parker to turn up eventually. 

Of course there are some female commentators but the point is these are what I fear I would turn into if I ever turned my webcam on.  Oh well I suppose there's worse things to turn into...

Although there are some less predictable commentators - Tzvi Lebetkin if you like your pop culture criticism Jewish …  

I have to say sometime some of them seem to stretch the “fair use” of movie clips quite far but then who understands that?  Erm…

The other problem with this sort of thing is creating content of any kind quickly becomes a treadmill and one imagines how exhausting it must be to constantly find new things to criticise.  Might be fun if they moved away from popular culture occasionally and criticised the films of Federico Fellini or Mervyn LeRoy… credit to the Critical Drinker for his excursions off-piste – worth watching if you like your film criticism Scottish and pissed.

Don’t even ask me to attempt to understand political youtubers like Dick Coughlan or the people he interacts with … I like it that there’s political stuff out there but … generally I’d rather cut my toenails than get involved with anything that much… as a natural coward.  

So anyway… I just thought it would be fun to do an article criticising the critics for a change and …

Well,  a lot of these people make me feel like Miss Marple at Bertrum’s Hotel.  For those of you who have forgotten the plot – Miss Marple goes to stay in the hotel because it hasn’t changed.  However, the longer she stays there the more she becomes uncomfortable - for the reason it hasn’t changed is that it is a front for criminal activity and so the economic pressures that would normally force change do not.  It is an enclosed world and it has become enclosed because it is unhealthy and it is unhealthy because it is enclosed.  That isn’t to say people shouldn’t celebrate or enjoy the past but just that occasionally we need to recognise that the past cannot ever be recreated.  That isn’t to say we can’t learn from the past but… 

“I learned (what I supposed I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life really is a One Way Street, isn’t it?”