Here’s the key marketing message; this is a “one-nation” government, David Cameron is saying, through the mouth of the Queen. But, given that he spent the election campaign suggesting that five million of her subjects should have no say in lawmaking if they voted for the wrong party, Her Majesty may feel this is a bit rich. Critics would say that the one nation is actually England, given that that is where the vast majority of Conservative MPs come from.
I don’t even think Charlie Brooker could write an episode of Black Mirror this bleak
I… am speechless
what in hell?
The BBC has been casting envious glances at Channel 4′s “poverty porn” for a while – see this interview where the BBC2 controller waxes lyrical about Benefits Street, for instance.
Looking at the article, what I’m guessing has happened here is that someone is saying “let’s make a show about the working poor and how hard you have to work to make a living” and then someone else is saying “OK, that’s not very sexy though, let’s do it like The Apprentice”, and they haven’t fitted the pieces together and realised how fucking horrific and callous those two ideas sound together. Or they have and don’t care, of course, because it’s edgy.
And it fits with the nation of voyeurs, net curtain twitchers, finger-waggers and tale-tellers we seem to have become.
In which Nightcrawler does Weird Tales; Iceman does Back to the Future; we want a vacation home in Dave Cockrum’s brain; Bamfs are terrible; the 1983 Iceman miniseries is straight-up bananas; parents just don’t understand; and Rachel will take literally any excuse to talk smack about John Ruskin.
X-PLAINED:
Vanisher
Nightcrawler #1-4
Bizarre Adventures #27
Iceman #1-4
The Well at the Center of Time
The downside to hanging out with pirates
A shark wizard in a tiny loincloth
Better living through sound-effect awareness
Boggies
The key to a classic Nightcrawler story
Earth-5311
Bamfs
The full extent of Rachel’s Smurfs knowledge
Cretaceous Sam
Sehv
Illyana Rasputin’s porn collection
The Drake family
An exceptionally unlikely girl next door
The definitive Miles’s Mom anecdote
Marge Smith / Mirage
White Light
Idiot
Kali (but not that one)
Two generations of Officers Ratchit
Pornography no one wants to see
Death by time travel
Oblivion
Night Man (kinda)
Our ideal cross-media adaptations
NEXT WEEK: X-Men ’92, with Chris Sims and Chad Bowers!
You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!
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X-Plain the X-Men recaps two minis I read as a kid. The Iceman mini was actually reprinted in the British Secret Wars comic, with a third of a U.S. issue every British issue. It was very, very odd to me at the time.
