Ready To Win?

Watching Andy Murray, loose a Grand Slam Final once again without taking a set, was an experience totally at odds with the way he has played in the previous matches, at Melbourne Park. He would have been Scotland’s first singles Grand Slam winner, as would Caroline Wozniaki for Denmark and Na Li for China, so the pressure is of course immense.

However in the UK, which sees itself as the home of many contemporary global sports, arguably the need to win a males singles Grand Slam is greater than elsewhere, Fred Perry was the last well over 70 years ago. Which begs the question is Andy Murray ready to win? At the moment he gets a life outside the Grand Slams for 44 weeks of the year. This would end.

He would become sporting royalty in the UK and be vying with the Royal marriage for story of the year. The UK’s sports Personality of the Year guaranteed, and a, knighthood probably before he is 30. His only chance to lessen the British sporting hysteria would be to win shortly after England have won their other Sporting Holy Grail the soccer world cup. A very slim hope indeed.   

Daily Newspaper

With the imminent launch of News International and Apple’s Ipad only newspaper the Daily, it looks as if the way we read the news is about to take a giant leap.

There are online subscriptions to existing newspapers. Both the Wallstreet Journal and the Times Online (both owned by News International) can be accessed via a subscription. The latter reputedly has lost somewhere between 95-99% of its readership since it began to charge last year. Its no secret that Murdoch is not an enthusiast of the very largely free access online to the news. As John Lanchester points out in the London Review of Books (December 2010) - the fact that you have to login with passwords every time you want to read the TOL, and have to pay a large fee, very much counts against usage.

There are existing newspaper type websites which do not charge, eg Huffington Post, which is largely made up of articles and does not attempt to break up to the minute news.

However the Daily, is the first example of a newspaper, charging a weekly subscription, only available on the ipad (not on pc)  and arriving daily, presumably, as the title suggests. Sneak previews suggest it may be high on pictorial content, and have many social websites access points, as you would expect from an Apple product. However being from a Murdoch stable can we expect excellent standards of journalism and insightful articles and editorial ? Possibly not.  

The advantages of news on the web, is that it rolls over and frequently updates. Is the daily a once per day event, which doesn’t update ? Or linked so that the version you read at 9am is different in effect from the one read at 4pm, the same day ? I suspect it would have to be. One would expect that the 14 million ipad users worldwide are a bunch who are not wanting their newsonline to be a few hours behind the TV news which is playing in the background and can also be viewed simultaneously from the settee. In that respect it would not be a daily at all.

However Murdoch and News International may never the less, be ushering the future of not just how we view news on line, but how we view web pages generally. The Daily may be charged at 99c per week. We may not be that far from paying a subscription, possibly monthly which allows us to view a number of bundled websites. It will remain free at the point of access as it were, however we will have paid in advance for usage. This is where Murdoch’s legacy will be, and hopefully not in the standards of journalism.

Scrooge And The Doctor - Of Their Time

HG Wells’ character in the Time Machine, could control his time travel and we tend to think of this as the first time travel saga. There was also the dream/time travel tale of the Great Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur’s Court.  

However, arguably, the Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge was the first literary time traveller, albeit only able to view the past, and see possible futures and within his own lifetime. It seems fitting that the Doctor should be in a Christmas Carol drama, being the UK’s premier, adopted, time traveller. Able to travel through time but not entirely under his own control either, due to the vagaries of the Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. 

George Bailey, in It’s A Wonderful Life, was given a chance to see a world in which he had never existed, in an American update on the Christmas Carol theme. Where as Scrooge was shown how the world could be if he continued in his present ways, George Bailey was shown what would have happened if he had never had any influence at all. It’s a Wonderful Life was not particularly popular with audiences at the time of its release. 

Possibly due to the supernatural element of angels, and the main character travelling to a time in which he didn’t exist, a parallel universe.

Film Noir, was a popular genre in immediate post war cinema and yet this was a piece of smalltown, apple pie, whimsy. Except, as David Thomson * points out, it becomes a Film Noir like nightmare for George. 

The subsequent re emergence of It’s A Wonderful Life, through TV re runs, and the support of more recent filmmakers, Speilberg for example, has helped lead into the present era in which Sci-Fi and Fantasy/Horror, movies and literature are more than common place, they are the norm. These genres are no longer just a male preserve, if they ever really were.  Harry Potter and the Twilight series, and the Time Travellers Wife  attest to this.

What each of these tales have in common are characters travelling in time/struggling in parallel universes yet never the less, waging the age old battle of good against evil. Fantasy and Science (fiction) applied in our worlds against these perennial opposing religious forces.

Whether it’s the first time traveller Scrooge mending his ways and crossing the divide, or the selfless actions of George Bailey, ensuring Bedford Falls survives, or the Doctor pitting wits against the Evil Daleks and guaranteeing that our world never descends into a form of dystopia -  Pottersville. They are never completely in control of their time travel, but they are engaged in this age old battle.

* A Biographical Dictionary Of Film – David Thomson