Good and Bad Characters

 How is it that so many good characters, in literature and films, and probably in other works such as stage plays, are so dull? Just think of the princesses in Disney animation, such as Snowhite, just so flat and two- dimensional. On the other hand, the villains are generally far more interesting and complex and make more interesting characters, which, although we know they are evil in most cases, we tend to root for them and cheer for them usually. Think of Abanazer, the wicked character in the 'Aladdin' pantomime, or the Ugly Sisters in 'Cinderella,' they are more fleshed out than the flat and rather dull central characters of Aladdin and Cinderella. In Dickens, so many of his central characters seem rather uninteresting. Think of Oliver in Oliver Twist. He's at the centre of the story, things happen to him, but he never initiates anything. Similarly, with David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby. These characters don't appear to have any effect on what happens to them, it's the characters who revolve around them who do all the work of moving things forward. In that respect, they are somewhat helpless. It appears that they can't change the course of their lives or their story journey. At the heart of a good story, there should be a journey in the sense that the lead character changes during the course of the story, so by the conclusion they have learned something and in that respect, changed.

In any form of storytelling, you have to have some sort of conflict, otherwise, your story can become flat and routine. The main protagonist needs a character to work against, so a good villain should be the character who creates this conflict. It's rather like sandpaper. It takes off the rough edges, shapes the protagonist. If he/she can overcome their problems, then they will grow and by the end of their journey through their story, they will have learned something.

Some cliches are used whenever the author wants to make sure the reader 'gets' whether a character is either good or bad. Used a great deal in television drama. Think EastEnders or Coronation street or one hundred and one Hollywood blockbusters. Colour is often used, as regards clothing. Dark is usually associated with 'bad.' (For years in television westerns from what I remember from being a child.) The villain almost always wore a dark shirt or jacket. The goodies usually wore light-colored clothing.  Think Dark Vader in the Star Wars films. He's black. You can't see his face (generally, if you can't see a character's face, either because he wears a mask (as Vader does.) or dark glasses, usually highly reflective, he's the bad guy. 

Disney has recently been raiding their back catalogue to reinvent some of their villains, such as Maleficent, who is the bad fairy who didn't get invited to the princesses Christening in the 1950's animation, 'Sleeping Beauty' and given her own film, starring Angelina Jolie. More recently they have given Cruella De Vil, the villain who wants to make dalmation puppies' coats into her own fashion accessory, namely, her own coat, in the 1961 animation classic '101 Dalmations' and the 1996 live-action remake. It's as if they are trying to give these characters a reason to be the way they are. Backstories or 'origins' stories. Disney is busily remaking all their classic animation movies, 'Beauty and The Beast,' 'Cinderella', 'Jungle Book', 'The Lion King' etc etc. Really for no better reason than they have the technology to make them using such things as three-dimensional computer animation. Not actually an improvement on the original and, frankly, a lazy way to create films.

Some, what I would call 'classic' villains in some of the classic fiction have been weakened by being portrayed as comic in such shows as 'Oliver!' and 'Les Miserables.' Fagin, the pickpocket gang leader, is made out to be a comic character in the musical when he's anything but comic in the novel on which it is based. He's far more evil and contemptible than the portrayal in the stage and film adaptation. The same can be said of Thenardier and his wife in 'Les Miserables' where they are sort of knock-about characters, but with a villainous streak. Perhaps this watering down of these characters is to make these shows more palatable for family audiences.

Why do so many villains in fiction have sidekicks who are often portrayed as bumbling idiots? The two henchmen of Cruella De Vil in the original novel by Dodie Smith and then the Disney versions of 'The 101 Dalmations' are shown to be totally inept. In some ways this is just for comic effect, but why on earth would someone employ such totally incompetent?

So, to wind up. I think I have managed to give fairly good summation of why and how so many dull characters, usually the central protagonists in some stories are so dull, compared to the more rounded and complete characters of the villains. We, as the audience, tend to want to root for those characters rather than the limp central characters.

Blackberry-Picking and Sunshine

It's been a bright and sunny day today. Having seen blackberries on the brambles all along the Redway, as I walk with Carol to and from the Academy, it was too much for me to ignore them and so I went out this morning and picked quite a few. It looks, though, that others have had the same idea. Probably not as many as there might have been. And you can hardly blame people for getting the same idea as me as it's just a few yards from the back of our house onto the Redway and pick a bowlful of berries.

We have been searching for Carol's Driving Licence. The plastic card bit, which contains her driver's number. I have been on-line attempting to find a reasonable quote for our car insurance which runs out at the end of October. You have to put in your car registration number as it links to the D.V.L.C. database which brings up the make of car, model etc. I have my driving licence card in my wallet where I keep all my cards, loyalty cards such as Nectar and Tesco Clubcard, Debit cards etc. You also enter this driver number to show proof of your identity in order to set up your car insurance when you do this on-line with a number of insurance companies. So we have spent the past day searching the house for this card and eventually found it in the most unlikely of places but then we decided to just ring our current insurance company, Swinton, and decided to continue with our current company, but managing to get a better quote and avoid the hefty excess that was on the current policy. So, it's done and the policy will start at the end of October. The plastic card and the paperwork for Carol's driving licence was still stuck onto the 'Counterpart' paperwork section of the licence, as it had come in the post all those months ago and obviously had never been separated. They always seem to use the most sticky substance to attach these cards to either letters or 'counterpart' driving licences which are really difficult to remove. A gum-substance like chewing gum which then gets stuck to everything else it comes into contact with. Just annoying and unnecessary.

You no longer need to have the paper part of your driving licence. They have done away with this seemingly pointless bit of paper from the 8th June. I could never see the point of having the paper part of your driving licence as it was always getting lost. If the system was completely computerised it seemed a bit of a waste of time having it also on a paper document which was always going to be separated from the neat little picture card which you carried around in your wallet as I do with mine.

I walked to the shop in Galloways in Coffee Hall to take money out of the A.T.M. there this morning. Not only is walking good exercise, but it allows me to think positively about my writing and I've now got some more ideas to put into the various bits of work I'm working on. Well, if walking was good enough for Charles Dickens, who used to do his best thinking for his novels whilst walking, then it's good enough for me. it's so easy to take my iPod and listen to a podcast which I can download easily, but pondering plot-structure seems far more positive and useful. No end of squirrels chasing up and down the trees and on the grass. They come really close to me and I spent some time watching them. We seem to have quite a few of these cheeky, nimble little creatures around Milton Keynes. Also, I find many conkers under the horse chestnut trees along the side of the road and pick a handful up to take home. Do children still go 'conkering' as we used to as children? Do they still tie them onto bits of string and play the game of 'conkers' or have the 'health and safety' people stopped this game? Pity if they have.

I'm actually reading a Charles Dickens novel at the moment, 'Nicholas Nickleby.' I read it over 30 years ago, just before the famous Royal Shakespeare Company production was shown on Channel Four in  it's opening year. A good old-fashioned story that fair cracks along at a good lick and keeps you entertained with some of his most intriguing and preposterous comic creations. I'm sure that Victor Hugo must have read it, along with 'Oliver Twist' as there are some similarities with his 'Les Miserables' which I have also read. 

Recent Reading . . . and Some Writing . . . Part 2

I mentioned in the last post how I was influenced by radio drama for my selection of reading material. I suppose the same could be said of what I watched on television. The first big drama adaptation I remember was 'The Forsyte Saga" which would have been one of the really big serial adaptations done by the BBC in the early 1960's and I think opened on the new channel BBC 2. We didn't have BBC 2 at the start of it's broadcast in 1964 as you had to buy a special set as it was in 625-lines as all other channels were 405-line and you had to have a duel set that could receive the new channel as well as having a special ariel which we didn't have, so I would have had to wait a few years later for this series to be shown on BBC 1, perhaps around 1967-8. I read all the novels, written by John Galsworthy. I think there must have been around 9 or 10 books and the television adaptation ran for some 26 episodes. I cannot imagine a television adaptation running to that many episodes today. Something like 'Downton Abbey' runs for no more than 8 episodes a series, although the next series, the last, will be the 6th. 

The B.B.C., in all it's infinite wisdom, always showed some sort of adaptation of a 'worthy' classical novel at teatime on a Sunday during the 1960's, and over the years many Dickens adaptations were shown. I don't know why they imagined that Charles Dickens would be suitable for children, but I suppose it was aimed at what you'd call a 'family' audience. Today if they do an adaptation of a classic novel, Dickens, Austen, Eliot or whoever, they schedule it much later and as a result the productions are a good deal more hard-hitting. These productions were also done in much longer runs, say 12-13 episodes, which actually suits a Dickens as the novels were originally published in serial form. Today you'd be lucky if a production is 4 episodes or even less. I remember as a child they did 'Great Expectations' (and there have been numerous versions done over the years since.) and being terrified by the opening sequence where Magwitch, the escaped convict, meets the young and innocent Pip in the churchyard. I think I would have been as terrified in much the same way as Pip. I got to read the novel and from that began to read further Dickens novels. In the early days of Channel 4, around 1982, the year it opened, they showed a television version of the R.S.C. stage adaptation of "Nicholas Nickleby". It was done on stage in two parts and the running time was something like 8-9 hours. A truly memorable version. I read the book before it was shown on television. I am again reading "Nicholas Nickleby" and enjoying it very much. It is so full of some wonderful characters and, although you might say that Dickens does somewhat 'over-egg the pudding' with some of his writing, and it's not particularly fashionable, but it cracks along at a fair old pace and you can't call it boring in any way. It's hard to believe that Dickens was in his 20's when he  wrote it and also that it was published in episodic form, which makes me wonder how much he had planned the storyline in advance and how, once the episodes were published, did he wish he could go back and alter bits of the story? Also, he was writing the next novel, which I believe was "The Old Curiosity Shop," which would have overlapped "Nicholas Nickleby." It must have been very complicated to have two novels being written and published concurrently. No doubt he had started writing "Nicholas Nickleby" as the previous novel, "Oliver Twist" was being written and published. The thought doesn't bear thinking about. He must have been very organised.

I worked on an episode of "Sherlock Holmes", one of the Granada series which was made during the 1980s, when I did a lot of 'walk-on' work. It was "The Man With The Twisted Lip" and shot in King's Lynn. As a result of that I decided to read some of the stories and had a complete volume of the stories (since lost) but I now have an annotated set of volumes which has been edited by Leslie S. Klinger. I have been working my way through the stories gradually (not completed as yet.) The Granada series is being repeated on one of the digital television stations we can get through Sky (I think it is ITV Encore, which shows a lot of back-catalogue shows, including "Downton Abbey.") So I am able to see the stories in really good adaptations, although I must say some of the acting is somewhat 'over-the-top.' I'm not over-keen on the modern version of the Conan Doyle stories, "Sherlock" which stars Benedict Cumberbatch. I'm  afraid I prefer the original stories and don't like them being fiddled about with. I did see the first series and quite enjoyed them but the last series, for me, was a disappointment. I won't be watching the next series which is due out around Christmas.