In The Future There Will Be Shrubberies
Marching for Palestine, sketch comedy news, and some 1970s buildings for you all to enjoy
Hello everyone! Hope you’ve all had a good week, full of beans and spunk.
This morning in Brighton has been one of rumbling thunder, hailstones, and an old lady in a cafe telling all about her waterproof trousers.
March for Palestine
As we know, the current UK government and opposition consensus is that Israel should keep bombing Gaza until everyone is dead.
Come along on the march tomorrow to remind them we do not agree.
Next Level Sketch Xmas Special
We’ve got a splendid lineup this month! All comedy nights do their Christmas special in November, right? It’s traditional.
Let me tell you a bit about our lineup.
Lorna Rose Treen is a wonderful character comedian, fresh off winning Edinburgh and completing a sold-out Soho Theatre run.
Charlie Vero-Martin is a NLS favourite, who was brilliant at last year’s festive special and I’m sure she will be again.
Lachlan Werner1 is a hilarious, beautiful queer ventriloquist, also just off a sold-out Soho Theatre run.
Sketchy Ones are a pair of PROPER telly actors who also, that’s right, recently did a sold-out Soho Theatre run in their sketch guise.
Early bird tickets are still on sale if you fancy catching yourself a bargain.
Modernism in Doctor Who
I’ve been enjoying the 1973 Doctor Who serial “Frontier in Space”, as I recover from a slight cold.
I wrote recently (ish) about the slow cancellation of the future, and how it’s now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
In the 1970s, multiple futures still existed. In this Third Doctor story, we have a faintly dystopian one, straight out of a contemporary conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare.
We’re talking world government, population control, and a woman President.
As well as a simmering Cold War with a race of aliens known as the Russians - sorry, the Draconians - we see an economy that seems based mainly on interplanetary flour delivery.
I’m fascinated by the architecture of this future Earth.
The prison complex that the Doctor and Jo find themselves marched around looks suspiciously like the South Bank Centre.
This might suggest the show’s location wonks were trying to associate high modernist concrete walkways with Orwellian misery.
But then we see that the Draconian’s embassy is also modernist, in the form of 8a Fitzroy Park in Highgate.
Leafy, spacious, and up-to-date, it is the perfect home away from home for any discerning green-skinned bulbous headed space imperial.
And Oscar Niemeyer’s Congresso Nacional in Brasilia stands in for Earth Presidential Headquarters.
So we conclude this is a future of uniform modernism - an assumption, post-Roman Point, that already felt dated.
Modernism as shorthand for the future would go on to have a long shelf life.
As late as the millennium, Star Trek’s vision of the 23rd century was still distinctly 1970s.
I am of the generation raised to imagine our cities looking, for better or for worse, radically different from our current reality.
In today’s shows, future cities don’t differ much from those of the present, architecturally. The Hunger Games’ Capitol could be in the Midwest of 2023, if it wasn’t for some CGI neo-classical flourishes.
And Star Trek has gone in on the act, in banal fashion: the Paris of Star Trek: Discovery is Canary Wharf, or some city in China you’ve never heard of but already has twice the population of Greater London.
Nothing dates like the future. The present can feel eternal. We must reimagine it all.
I met Lachlan dancing in a haunted primary school. He got moves.