A MAD WORLD 

MY MASTERS*                                                                

Here’s some splutter I came across on t’Interweb the other day.

                                                                          

"Hollywood and the entertainment industry are paying more and more attention to issues of diversity and gender equality in films and television shows and now Walt Disney Studios has a new tool to help. Announced at the New Zealand Power of Inclusion Summit earlier this week, Disney is partnering with Geena Davis and her Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to deploy a new tool that functions as a "spellcheck" for gender bias in film and television scripts.

According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, the new "GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias" tool is an AI technology-using digital tool that is able to analyze a script's text and evaluate the number of male and female characters and if the breakdown is representative of the actual population. The tool, which was developed at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, can also be used to evaluate how many characters are LGBTQ+, are people of colour, have disabilities as well as other groups frequently underrepresented in media. Additionally, the tool can check the number of lines spoken by group as well as additional characteristics. According to Davis, Disney is the pilot partner for the tool."

I checked that it wasn’t All Fools’ Day... but it wasn’t. Then I pinched myself to make sure it wasn’t a bad dream… nope! Well they do say truth is stranger than fiction.

But then I twigged it. This must be down (get it) to the impact that this megastar met with after driving off that cliff in the film ‘Thelma and Louise’. The mega G force landing couldn’t have done much good for the old grey matter. And I thought they used stunt drivers… but there you go… and stop… suddenly!

So, if the judgemental Gina has her way, I reckon that the entire Shakespeare canon won’t make the grade, along with plays by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, Neil Simon and Molière, to mention only a few. Varied as the characters are in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ I suppose the Association for the Advancement of Aardvarks would have an issue with an accurate dramatisation, since there is nary an “African ant bear” in Lewis Carroll’s classic. The closest thing is the Duchess’s baby that turns into a pig!

Joking aside, this is seriously sinister…. shades of ‘1984’… and they are all greyish. Of course the Thinkpol would be cock-a-hoop… or should that now be, “cock and hen-a-hoop”! Gosh, we really are going to have mind our Ps and Qs… which unfortunately excludes twenty-four other letters of the alphabet! Wow… this is a minefield… or should it be “a yourfield, or “an ourfield”? Stop the world I want to get out!

 

In the month of March this year, in London, there was a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ featuring an all-female cast of... “women of colour”. We are talking historical figures here… living beings. Yes, the Bard was occasionally a little cavalier with history, but not to that extent.

“During the Stalin era, Russian history was rewritten to conform to the political demands of an increasingly controlling regime.” ‘Rewriting Russian History: Stalin Era Representations’ -

Ludmilla A. Trigos

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” 1984 - George Orwell

*’A Mad World, My Masters’ is a Jacobean stage play written by Thomas Middleton, a comedy first performed around 1605 and first published in 1608. It would surely be a victim of the blue stocking’s blue pencil!

               

            

ALL RIGHT
ON THE 
KNIGHT!

So shout, hip-hip-hooray,
He's a jolly good fellow…
21 today!*

Yes… my twenty-first script has just had a bottle of bubble bath broken over its bows, before sliding down the slipway… sideways.

The title is "Flimflamalot – a prank in King Arthur’s court"

All right...  it’s from the same stable as the Python’s ‘Spamalot’, which was a spin-off of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", but then the story goes all the way back to 1135 (that’s the year, not twenty-five minutes to midnight) when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote “Historia regum Britanniae”, (“History of the Kings of Britain”) a fictional work, which includes an account of King Arthur’s conquests.

Fast forward to 1889, when the American humourist and writer, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) wrote “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court “, which was filmed in 1931 as “A Connecticut Yankee”, starring Will Rogers. In 1949, Bing Crosby played the time-traveller in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, which was a musical film adaptation of the novel.

“The Sword in the Stone” was a 1963 Disney animated film about Arthur's childhood, loosely adapted from T.H. White's take on the legend.

The "Carry On" team’s 1975 TV series, “Carry On Laughing” included two courtly contributions… “"Under the Round Table", and "Short Knight, Long Daze".

The French series "Kaamelott" (2005–2009) featured a humorous look at the legend.

And so it goes on...

Nothing new there then, well. apart from my script, which incidentally, could be

conveniently performed at any time of the year, as part of a regular season.

Hey… that’s cool!

Well… it was the age of shivery!

* The song, “I’m Twenty-One Today” was made popular by the English music hall comedian and singer, Jack Pleasants (1875–1924) Born in Bradford, he was a regular in pantomimes. His repertoire also included, “Come in and Cut Yourself a Piece of Cake”, “I Want to be Pally with Everyone”, “It's My Bath Night Tonight”, “Where Do Flies Go in the Winter Time?” and the self-effacing, “I’m Shy, Mary Ellen, I’m Shy”.