The Island Odyssey

I took the 1730 ferry from Rafina.

Only one terminal at the end of little quay – not the confusing port I expected. It was a full-size ferry – not the smaller nippier craft I had envisaged. Finding the bus-stop to get there was trickier and involved asking lots of questions. Luckily, I did this before visiting the archaeological museum as most of these out of town buses are spread about vague areas of the city without useful signage to make the process predictable.

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On the boat, I got chatting with a Greek islander. He spoke like a very well-educated upper class Englishman which he attributed to spending some years in London. He waxed lyrical about Greek philosophers when he saw I was reading Plato’s Symposium before bemoaning how little today’s schoolchildren are taught about their wise ancestors. He was more evasive about less abstract matters and I learned nothing personal about him other than a mumbled reference he made to working in finance. He expressed an interest in my careers as a journalist and therapist while expressing doubts about both. He described himself as self-actualised, but only after we parted did I reflect how negative he was about everything. 

I neglected to do any real research on the practicalities of staying in Mykonos.
This proved to be a mistake.

As I disembarked at the new port at around 2230, I rather expected to be in the centre of the action. First impressions suggested I was just out of the action and this was why everyone from the ferry was now stepping into a car. Obviously, I decided to walk. Given the choice between following a sign towards the old port and a place I had never heard of – I chose the latter, which involved walking up a very long hill on the hard shoulder while HGVs trundled past threateningly. Two jolly-sounding English girls walked behind me which gave me the impression I was following an acceptable path to somewhere. They soon disappeared.

At the top of the hill, I found a kebab shop where I ate well and drank a large beer. It was one of those times that a large beer is exactly what you need. I asked the staff about hotels and they spoke amongst each other in what sounded like pessimistic voices. I spoke more Greek than they spoke English. I understood that they thought I was Italian, but didn’t have enough Greek to explain I wasn’t. In a mixture of Italian and Greek, they pointed me in the direction of where some hotels lay.

This proved to be a mistake.

Evidence of hotels did exist, but they were very much closed for the season that – it transpired – began in about a week’s time. Google Maps placed me somewhere in the middle of the Aegean Sea. I continued to walk into what proved to be the largely deserted heartland of the island.

This proved to be a mistake.

I walked around four miles. My two bags helpfully balanced the load. Twinkling lights in the far distance beckoned me onwards like Sirens shining torches to lead me further astray. Each illuminated a sleeping village or the kind of homestead that didn’t welcome visitors at 1.30 in the morning. Several gardens housed large aggressive dogs seeking company.

I began to think about sleeping in a ditch. I even inspected one, but changed my mind. I turned back as it was clear that this was not hotel country. Eventually I settled on a derelict house that I had passed earlier constructed solely of concrete floors and roofs. The walls were not yet an afterthought. I mounted to the second floor of the building on the shaky premise that wild dogs don’t attack people upstairs. This gave me an opportunity to watch the stars and feel like I wasn’t too old to experience adventures. Also, how my adventures usually involve some degree of suffering.

At around 0330, I decided to retrace my steps. It was too romantic to sleep.
When I had returned to the Crossroads of Doom, close to the kebab shop, I elected to take the opposite direction to what I had been advised four hours earlier. After about 10 minutes, the bay enclosing the old port appeared beneath me.

Now that I was in the right place, the fact about it still being the close season became more demonstrably obvious. I spent the next four hours walking up every single street in a very hilly bay of many streets. The lights were on but there was nobody home.  

At one stage, two fishermen discovered me at the seafront writing my diary by torchlight. The elder seemed scared when I asked him in correct Greek whether he spoke English. His strapping young companion was less intimidated and gave me complicated directions to navigate the labyrinth of streets of the old port towards the one open hotel on the island.
 

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Appetites Unbound

Around 7am, I found an open boutique hotel. I didn’t think I would fit in and the nice well-groomed young man apologised for the rooms costing a minimum of 120 Euros. More usefully, he told me the hotel across the road charged half that ‘if I didn’t mind waiting an hour till they opened.’ This didn’t even register as an inconvenience.

While waiting outside, I asked several departing guests if it really was a hotel to discount the possibility if it being a mirage. Eventually, I was let in and I complied fully with their invitation to eat a large breakfast. Sometime later, I was shown into my luxurious quarters within which I lounged expansively for most of the day while planning a fitting dinner.

Later, down in the small, chic and photogenic port, I ate a slow-roast lamb shank. The waiting staff were genuinely charming, which is always nice when you’re travelling alone. But their brandy still cost 30 Euros a shot. I settled for an ouzo. They didn’t love me enough to give me a free one. I thought that was tradition.

Nonetheless, it felt like a triumphant day after its disastrous start. I successfully changed my return ferry to Athens and found another hotel – still way beyond my comfort needs, but costing only 35 Euros. This would allow me to take a day-trip to nearby Delos. The manager, Maria, was charming and offered me a cream cake as it was her birthday. I said I would collect it later as I was off for my supper. She never offered it again despite my persistently hanging around reception without an obvious objective. I later found out my bathtub was a Jacuzzi. I used it every night regardless of my cleaning needs.

I asked Maria’s assistant if breakfast was included. She said ‘No!’ As if I was mad. This balanced out the Jacuzzi bonus.

Eating otherwise followed a good-bad pattern. One afternoon, I lunched at a gyros house. This was to avoid paying the 20 Euros it had cost the previous day for some fried cod and a fruit juice. I paid 17 Euros instead for some vile sausages and two portions of chips. I only asked for one. The waitress was too tired of life to offer me the coffee we had earlier discussed. Eventually she accepted my money when I went to find her.

One evening, I sought out a local restaurant where I had a (still) frozen moussaka. When I pointed this out, the waitress looked mortified, which helped a bit, and was moved to ask someone to finish cooking it. The menu’s most impressive feature was the selection of baguettes – one for each of the 12 Olympians.

On my final morning, I found the baker’s open and feasted on fine pastries and coffee for a sprinkling of change. I had belatedly hit the jackpot. After enjoying these in the pleasant morning sun, I popped back in to tell the friendly staff their wares were kostimo! Kostimo has no meaning. It is a mix of nostimo, which means ‘delicious’, and kalos, which means ‘good’ so would make quite a good word in the right circumstances. They smiled and said goodbye.

Otherwise, my best eating memory was a creation involving honey, cream, pistachios and filo pastry called Galaktoboureko. It's a mouthful in every sense and the kind of dessert that makes you laugh with pleasure - though it's best to swallow first.

The surprisingly readable Symposium follows a discussion about love between a group of prominent Athenians. Socrates gets the best lines and like most ancient Greek thinking the discourse seems strangely modern aside from the odd absence of any mention of women. While the goddess of love is Aphrodite, she is considered a better class of woman for not having a mother.

My favourite line was ‘one could hear a girl playing a flute’. My girlfriend plays the flute. Perhaps if I had a flute-playing boyfriend I could tell the difference. Another quote to remember: ‘it isn’t easy for a man in my condition to sum up your extraordinary character in a smooth and orderly sequence.’ Quite hard to say without slurring when in one’s cups.

I am also reading an abridged version of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. I was pleased to know that during his Tenth Labour, Heracles wandered down the whole coast of Italy before realising he had taken a wrong turning. I could do that.

On my last day, I took the boat to Delos, once home to the navy of the Greek city states and supposed birthplace of the God Apollo. It was an appropriate setting to celebrate Ancient Greece with its rugged hills, scattered ruins, and seductive blue waters. I climbed up to the shrine of Apollo where I was caught short. For my blasphemy, I lost complete sight of the path I had struggled up and was forced to climb down the rocky sides where I was briefly engaged in a stand-off with a family of goats.

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I was the only tourist to trail around the island museum. The one employee followed me around like a very bad spy as if worried I was going to run off with one of the larger than life marble statues that towered over me. I asked her to show me where the museum was on its model of the very small deserted island. She said she had no idea where we were, before adding: ‘eets my first day’. After I snapped several photographs without my flash, she asked me not to use my flash. Only on a deserted island can you get this kind of personal attention.

The return journey to Athens passed efficiently without incident. A bus from Rafina whisked me back to the city centre without a moment’s delay and a room in my allegedly full hotel materialised for my convenience.

The Drug Trafficker

‘I’ll sue you, and I’ll sue your newspaper,’ hissed Frank, leaning his gaunt face close enough for me to smell his sulphurous prison breath.

Frank was a commanding presence, and a threatening one, as he thrashed out his terms. He was clarifying how he would respond if I used his real name. This was no great surprise. Unless he escaped or bribed his way out ahead of his scheduled sentence – many former associates on both sides of the wall would rather he kept his insights to himself.

The Colombian gang, for example, who the previous week had stabbed, minced, and set fire to a prisoner in a neighbouring cell during some periodic riots. I saw the stringy detritus of the victim’s genitalia nailed above the door of the next-door cell – a grisly example of internal criminal justice. Their previous owner made the mistake of ‘cutting’ a fellow inmate with a strong support network. This superficial ‘hit’ perhaps netted him $10. In response for this outrage, the victim wanted bloody revenge, rather than counselling.

The knifeman must have been desperate or desperately ignorant, Frank reasoned, as the Colombian was left alive as well as being one of the more influential residents. The last Frank saw of his neighbour was of him being surrounded by a gang of men circling him silently with the grim intent of Shakespearian villains. Frank closed his cell door before half a dozen crudely-fashioned blades swooped fatally down upon their target.

Consulting the Oracle

 

With time running out, I headed off to Delphi the next morning.

Thankfully, I left early for the hidden bus-station, which I walked past before realising that the overgrown pavement I was following alongside a major road suggested I was straying from the path.

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Delphi, situated several hours drive away at the foot of Mount Parnassus, proved to be the best place of all. Thankfully, I elected to stay overnight as I was too late to visit the site of the oracle that afternoon and it would have been a great disappointment not to spend the night somewhere so tranquil and fitting for a consultation with the gods.

The oracle has little to say now but the excited babble of waves of international school children were more garrulous – possibly heightened by the remnants of the hallucinogenic gas that had leaked out and lent the ravings of the original priestesses their ambivalence. I wonder how many cities were won and lost in their translation.

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The temples only now exist in the form of isolated clusters of columns mostly nested sleeping in the grass though the theatre and stadium are sufficiently intact to stir the imagination somewhat. The stunning view down the mountainside to the narrow ribbon of river in the valley floor many hundreds of metres below must have made it an inspiring sight for those arriving after many weeks arduous pilgrimage through the deserted and harsh landscape.  

Hotel and food were faultless – the latter involved a baked feta pie with sesame seeds, marmalade and honey followed by a wild boar and shallot stew that was so much more than ‘a stew’. The owner looked like a young Tony Soprano and was friendly in rather intense way. His girlfriend had just moved to London so he figured he should visit. He had never left Delphi and gave the impression he would be much happier hunting for my wild boar.

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Before I left, I bought a small Grecian urn from a lonely shopkeeper. I felt guilty as she wrapped it up slowly and carefully for my journey home. With each new layer of protection, she seemed to be rueing my decision not to buy any of the more expensive statuettes and vases that I had spent time admiring. I was possibly her only customer that day.

Aside from sporadic swarms of school children, it was a very quiet and peaceful haven of two small streets. As on the islands, it was relatively bereft of youthful inhabitants who had been presumably drawn to the bright lights of Athens.

But I was only passing through so it remains perfect in my memory.

On meeting the locals

An urbane, suited and moustachioed American invited me to join a throng being assembled at the bar. He admitted to being an oilman who had once been Scottish.

Further details were not forthcoming; he was more at ease drawing other strangers together and subtly conducting the flow of conversation from a distance, almost as if he wasn’t up to no good. Something Machiavellian in his dark piercing eyes could not be fully shrouded by his warm and persuasive manner. If a pub had a secret service, he was undoubtedly its ‘M’.

Unsurprisingly, I have no memory of his name. With incontestable insistence, he asked me about my greatest journalist achievement. Put on the spot amongst a crowd of strangers, I stated that I had none worthy of the boast, but he wouldn’t relent. When I awkwardly muttered about my recent ‘talking live about a guinea pig beauty contest’ on Radio 5, his expressive eyes widened in disbelief.

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‘But really?’ he responded with incredulity. Grasping to offer something more substantial, I stammered about an interest in human rights. He held his hands up in mock horror before comically clamping them over his ears. He gave the impression, for all his genial demeanour, that he found the concept of humans with rights quite beyond the pale. Later, the oilman made a suave exit. He wished us well with sinister charm and a significant look – perhaps the mere tip of the iceberg that concealed its true nature. My impression was that the next time things might not go so smoothly for us. 

Returning home, I was interrupted when entering my room. A near-naked middle-aged Ecuadorian man was descending the stairs from the floor above. Momentarily surprised to be caught wearing little more than a self-satisfied smile, he paused, before drawing himself up with all the dignity he could muster. Our eyes met and narrowed together in recognition. A few days earlier, he had approached me, very drunk, in a café, and asked me to be his blood brother. He looked uncertain, not quite placing me, before reverting to bluster.

‘I apologise for my appearance,’ he said with typical Latin sensitivity for appropriate sartorial elegance and deportment. ‘But I am going downstairs to have sex with the lady on the second floor.’

And with his head held high, he passed on by.

On hints of trouble

A prostitute grinned at me from a near toothless mouth and took my hand in an iron grip.

She whirled me about till the end of the song, before I prised her fingers off mine, one by one. Her friend whispered a coquettish greeting in my ear. She seemed friendly.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked with schoolboy innocence. ‘Colombia’, she huskily returned, while seeming to say a lot more with her eyes and lips.

‘What kind of work do you do?’

‘Masajes,’ she replied, after giggling inadvertently and swallowing a smile. Lips slightly parted, she encircled my middle finger with a firm hand before applying a stroking motion. ‘Tu quieres masajes?’ I did like massages, but I had no aches and pains, so declined politely.

Morgan tutted disapprovingly at our undignified frivolity. ‘You guys should have standards,’ he said with a grimace. ‘We’re just dancing!’ I laughed.

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‘Hmm.’ In his mind, other business was afoot. He had already warned Stewart.

‘See the fucker in the red shirt, huh?’ What do you think that fucker’s waiting for? He is strong, yes, but I would take… him… down.’ It was remarkable how many sentences this good-hearted Scandinavian could end with this apocalyptic phrase. And tonight, as prostitutes drifted across his vision, supposed revellers shifted position subtly about and around the dance floor looking, no doubt, to gain some strategic advantage when it all went off. He remained vigilant, assessing the threats, weighing up the real tough guys from those with muscles vainly sculpted in gyms, those that he could ‘take down’, if called upon now, as he’d done many times before.

All around, the crowd danced, sang and drank, as if there was no threat, no undercurrent of destruction bubbling up beneath the apparently innocent surface impression.

The club closed at two. Nothing had gone off. This time. Only Morgan knew how different it might have been. We departed to our beds peacefully, and blissfully ignorant. Somewhere close by, a small light blazed, illuminating the unsleeping sentinel, who is our ears and eyes.

On climbing mountains

My misery plummeted further with the unexpected barrier of a crevasse materialising in our path.

To me, it revoked the vague reassurance that the tariff of technical difficulty for the climb was negligible. Ironically, the crevasse represented descent, but a far hastier one than I craved. It also revealed the second aspect of my acrophobia – of falling helplessly into an uncharted abyss.I sat down for some minutes to contemplate the natural snow-bridge stretching across the gap, before calmly telling Abraham I would not be crossing it. It was a couple of feet wide and being ‘natural’ there was no accounting for its on-going capacity to support a human body. The depth of the crevasse remains unknown. The bridge spanning the void was the length of one long man and dipped down in the middle before rising to a steep slippery bank on the other side

I was painfully aware that I had failed to keep my footing when I had an entire mountainside to grip. True, I was attached to a professional guide, and one well-trained, I imagined, in catching stray jittery gringos. But how could rope skills defeat the laws of physics when his spare frame barely matched the weight of mine?

Two of the German climbers caught up, while I pondered neurotically. I waved them on, but they insisted I go first. The first gestured kindly enough, but I couldn’t tell whether it represented solidarity, sadism, or an opportunity for him to coldly make his own personal risk assessment. Staring at the narrow strip of snow ahead, I narrowed the focus of my gaze onto it – cropping out its surroundings from both my retina and mind’s eye. Numb with fear, I stepped forward to the brink figuring I had a one-in-three chance of falling in.

On getting lost in Quito

The next morning, I set off to explore the old city, but spent most of the day haplessly circling it while perambulating its bleak back-streets.

Seeking directions, I was offered a bewildering range of options from growing knots of debating locals. While familiar with my congenitally poor sense of direction, I was less aware of the courteous Latin habit of giving a helpful-sounding answer – correct or otherwise. Nonetheless, I was touched by their concern. One man insisted on waiting 20 minutes with me until I was safely aboard a bus. Several buses and a taxi merely brought me down more blind alleys. I walked alone through an underpass hewn into the mountainside – choking on the fumes of the hurtling traffic, before retracing my steps to avoid exiting the city altogether.

I  stumbled across a wizened old man playing a lonely fiddle. The fiddle was as scratched and worn out as its owner and the awful screeching sounds they emitted sounded like the soundtrack to a shattered dream. Less profitable busking than a self-imposed public humiliation for his failures in life. As his playing endured, his symphony of profound sadness was accompanied by tears and convulsive heaving sobs. I threw my spare change into the battered dusty hat at his feet – mere pebbles in the deep well of his miserable despair. I had only been lost that day.

On Brits abroad

And then there was Tracie. Tracie had several other descriptive names, and from these monikers much can be learned.

Given, rather than christened, by the god-fearing locals was the rather sinister La Bruja Pallida, or The Pale Witch. Scary Tracie was another, possibly down to her rather forward manner when tired and emotional – an impression most out of keeping with the genteel ways of the average Latina.

Auntie Tracie hinted at the eccentric relative who might educate you in ways too radical for the common-or-garden parent. The possible irony inherent in Doña Angelini – in that nobody ever called her it without smiling – was the source for my favourite sobriquet – Donna.

With a surname that includes the word Angel – it was the loveliest of surprises to hear her sing like one. This I hadn’t expected when one night she snatched the microphone off the lead singer of a band in the Hot Potato. She had sensibly first imbibed a bottle of rum to calm any possible performance anxiety. I was relieved and touched in equal measure by the strength and sweetness of the alto that emerged from her usually X-rated vocal cords. It reminded me of that Susan Boyle moment, but performed with the panache of a plastered Amy Winehouse.

My first sighting of her had been clearing the floor of a party with a voice like thunder. I concluded I would be safest keeping my distance. The second time, we were introduced formally by MJ on a busy Saturday night high street. I was intimidated less by the stentorian tone than being confused by a flow of words and dramatic gestures more complex than any Spanish I had heard that month.

Once I felt secure in her company, I was surprised to realise she was little over 5-foot tall. 

On shamanic ceremonies

Night fell within minutes of our arrival at the Shaman hut. He gestured towards a plastic container filled from an old petrol can. Within it, lay the magic potion.

‘How much should I drink?’ I asked Jorge. ‘All of it’, he replied. I sunk a huge and deeply unpleasant draught of the rank liquid. It took several difficult minutes to work my way through this bitter medicine. Shortly after, I found and used – in the fullest top and bottom capacity – the garden outhouse located about 10m from the backdoor.

Despite enormous efforts of mental and physical will, I was never to reach it again. It’s not just the taste that makes vomiting a natural reaction to Ayahuasca – it’s part of the process apparently. I followed the ritual religiously. Something happened about ten minutes later. Not quite sure what, but its effect on my ability to move and think was profound enough for me to forget most of my Spanish, bar the lie: ‘Toda esta bien’ (everything’s fine!) to the inquiries of Jorge. My English was soon reduced to the more honest ‘Urgah, naah!’, which sadly, my mono-lingual hosts were unable to fathom.

With these communication difficulties, it was easier to explore the depths of my soul, alone, in the middle of a jungle, under the spell of an overpowering hallucinogenic. My senses heightened to the myriad jungle sounds, my eyes accustomed to the moonlit sights. A lot of shimmering went on within the thick teeming canopy. 

Communion with the spirit world is the aim of these trips. They say you meet the animals you deserve. Shamans are thought to inhabit the bodies of the elusive jaguar.

I did not see any jaguars.

Editorials

First Call: Moving Scenes

Before handing over the reins temporarily, one of the last actions taken by editor Phil Lattimore was to gaze at my current mobile phone with a mixture of disdain and incredulity before suggesting I upgrade. I haven’t had it that long and it’s several eons more advanced than the previous one, the generous proportions of which made it particularly difficult to lose. But his look said as much as the stream of news stories I’ve read detailing the exciting blur of change in the industry.

This month’s issue chronicles that state of flux. Just when you’re getting used to colour-screen phones that sell themselves with pictures rather than words, along comes one that records bursts of video. More announcements too in the games world, with the arrival of downloadable games – some old, some new and several, in one form or another, blue. And the entry into the UK market of Daewoo and Chinese manufacturer DBTEL, injects some new blood into the market.

With the enormous costs of those just-over-the-horizon 3G licences to recoup, the industry is talking a good fight over its future income. A few briefings I’ve recently attended highlighted forecasts that spending on mobile services would steadily increase for some years. Hopefully, the increased competition will create choices allowing us all to enjoy the fruits of the new technology at a reasonable price. We don’t need Alvin Hall to tell us that mobile phones have financially embarrassed more people than unpaid library fines. Let us help you balance the books and add colour to your calls.

Gareth Mason
Acting Editor
What Cellphone November 2002

FIRST CALL:

LISTENING IN COLOUR

Walking down Kentish Town Road one recent lunchtime, I was accosted by two attractive blondes. Just another typical day? Strangely, no. For they were enthusiastically taking pictures of all who passed within the fixed range of their camera phones. And not any old camera phone, but the very one splashed on our front cover. They are the latest in the swelling ranks of new hybrids riding the crest of a promotional wave now breaking onto our high streets.

What’s more, Panasonic seems determined to shed its minor player image in the mobile industry by launching a product clearly not designed to merely fit into its rivals’ footsteps. Our review of the GD87 reveals it to be more than just a pretty fascia. Features aplenty, a diminutive frame and a screen displaying 65,000 colours are a good start.

And if we can count on one hand the number of MMS handsets today, tomorrow you’ll need a list as long as your arm. We do just that with a comprehensive roundup of all the models expected on the market by the New Year.

From taking pictures to giving presents, look no further than the Daze of Xmas. Here we lead you merrily by the handset through the ultimate mobile maze: trying to work out what mobile phone to buy for someone else.

This segues neatly into the MobileXtra – a free supplement featuring half a dozen of the most popular mobiles we’ve reviewed over the last year. And for those who can resist the lure of the new model, Unlock Stock explains your options when the SIM-card at the heart of your phone is closed to the advances of a new operator.

Gareth Mason
Acting Editor
What Cellphone December 2002

FIRST CALL:

GENERATION GAME

It’s a fertile time for the mobile phone industry. And trust me (I’m a journalist), we’re not just saying that to shift a few more copies. The splashes of colour screens spreading about the greyscales of our old mobile existence are now commonplace while the chiming and chirruping of polyphonic ringtones, though dangerously dependent on the humour and taste of their user, have become part of our city soundscape.

So, it’s no real surprise that in this, our annual awards issue, the contenders are largely drawn from the fresh fascias of recently launched handsets whose USPs may be standard features on new models by next spring. In fact, two of our review samples this month have both made a late dash for glory, though I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you which topped the podium. And it’s not just mobile phones gunning for What Cellphone’s ultimate seal of approval. The best network, online service, accessory and innovation of 2002 are all revealed from page 39.

If that wraps up last year, what of the new one? Java games and MMS picture messaging look set to figure heavily in mobile ad campaigns. Java games are covered in Mouthpiece and Game Academy, and as for MMS, the networks will look to make these all-seeing devices affordable for the masses they need to hook. So, it won’t just be smug technology hacks showing off in the pub with nowhere to send their pictures.

And we may finally get our first glimpse of 3G. Our report discusses how 3G will help us see, feel and hear in ways we’d never have imagined. Ok, so ‘feel’ may have to be covered by the vibrating alert for the moment, but wait till the next issue…

Gareth Mason
Acting Editor  
What Cellphone January 2003

FIRST CALL:

WE WILL PHONE THEM ON THE BEACHES

Winston Churchill, now officially Britain’s greatest son, wouldn’t have recognised the contents of a magazine like What Cellphone as he bellowed (rather too conspicuously): ‘I’m on the front line!’ Today’s ever-shrinking handsets take a back seat in Antique Mobile, a homage to these big, and dubious, fashion statements gaining a cult status.

Little else in the mobile industry bears much resemblance to its humble, over-sized origins. Certainly, little offered by 3G – the next generation of handsets and services – the details of which are finally emerging. If initial pricing suggests your average punter will be happy to stick with the current crop for a while longer – we’ll help find the best of these with our upgrade feature. Meanwhile, Lords of the Ring tackles a commonly heard complaint – your mobile may have 35 fancy ringtones, but can you hear any of them?

Otherwise, a product-packed issue features several new models with a distinctive appearance. A chameleon-like Motorola is reviewed alongside a console-impersonating Sagem and a Sharp whose sleek lines house a digital camera.

Finally, this issue brings my brief tenure at What Cellphone to a close, heralding the return of Phil Lattimore to the editor’s seat, upgraded and recharged by four months away. Personally, having worked in different areas of the consumer electronics industry, it’s been interesting to see the parallels between its rapidly converging parts. As with the computer world, the mobile phone industry has been successful in creating a niche for its wares in the lives of all but the most inveterate Luddite.

But it’s not the only parallel. Sadly, a near-guaranteed market sometimes compromises the way customers are treated – a dangerous habit when the industry now needs our billions to survive. The symptoms cover such ailments as poor service, inflexible contracts or customers footing the bill for networks not talking to each other. Another is the selective manual that neglects responsibility for how the product actually works. As Apple Mac fans love to point out, doing clever things needn’t be a chore. If you want our money, don’t make us work too hard for it.

Gareth Mason
Acting Editor
What Cellphone February 2003

VIVE LA REVOLUTION!

It’s that D-word again – so well-known they named a magazine after it. Can all this airplay be justified? We think so, seeing as it won’t be long before everything will be measured in ones and zeroes. The revolution is well under way in the UK, where you will soon be able to receive digital TV via cable, satellite or even your old aerial if you’re feeling nostalgic. And that’s not all…

Whether it’s TVs, mobiles phones, amplifiers, camcorders, decoders, cameras, VCRs, MiniDisc players, set-top boxes – just about anything containing the word ‘consumer’ or ‘electronics’ has been hit with the digital stick.

In this, our first issue of What Digital, we’ve got a clutch of hot new products to review. These include an MP3 device for downloading music from the Internet, the world’s smallest MiniDisc recorder and the world’s first CD recorder. We’ve even got Lara Croft – the world’s first digital woman – though I’m sure there’s life still in the analogue variety.

What’s more, we’ve drawn from our expert reviews on our leading consumer electronics titles. You’ve got the complete digital compendium. We hope it answers a few of your questions.

Gareth Mason
Editor
What Digital Spring 1999

Editorial:

GO WITH IT

Okay, so maybe boys like their toys. But it’s no longer a closed shop. They’re all at it now. Behinds the curtains of suburban homes, down dark alleys, sometimes – shamelessly – in broad daylight. They’re letting those digital devices seep into their lives. It starts with a few snaps on a harmless-looking, low-resolution digital camera. Before you know it, you’re shooting Digital8. Don’t kid yourself, you’re hooked. Men and women in all their extreme forms are up to their necks in it. When the current is that strong – all you can do is go with the flow.

TVs and satellite receivers are just the start. And where there’s a TV, there’s a VCR so you ought to know about JVC’s thoughts on the world’s first digital version. Perhaps you find the idea of recording 21 hours of programmes unimpressive? Well rent a video – sorry DVD – if it’s home cinema you want.

Too much of a life of indolence for you, perhaps? Well, get out in the sun (okay, fog) and live a little. You could always record it for posterity with a camcorder – which captures the action somewhat better than your Uncle Edgar’s Christmas slide show. Or perhaps, just take a few snapshots for those absent friends. Stick them on your PC and blast them across the Internet so they can splice you with their pet dog for a screensaver. Or better still, make a movie about it. And if music be your lifeblood, then read on. If they’re not playing your tune you can always call a friend. But what if you need a little bit more from your phone? Well, give it Internet access. Happy now?

In fact, there’s over 100 pages of technological wizardry to help make the daydreams come true for the well-heeled, the window-shopper and bargain-hunter alike. And if you’re still not interested, well you can… win an Internet TV. Like we said, go with it.

Gareth Mason
Editor
What Digital Winter 2000

UPFRONT:

THE PRICE IS RIGHT

The current debate over why many products are more expensive in the UK than on the Continent or US is sure to finger the electronics industry.

Good thing too, as you can usually estimate the cost of a stateside product coming here simply by changing the dollar sign to sterling. So, it was good to hear Samsung is launching a DVD player, exclusive to Comet, Woolworths and MVC, which will retail for under £280. Entry-level it may be – but early impressions suggest its performance will not fall far short (if at all) of its rivals. Images of cats and pigeons spring to mind.

Talking of unexpected surprises, DTS has finally arrived in these pages with Denon’s DTS AVD-1000 decoder, and more significantly – the sight (and sound) of some films encoded with the 5.1 channel alternative to Dolby Digital.

Also in this issue are reviews of Sony’s entry-level Digital8 camcorder, a group test of all the set-top boxes currently available and a feature on the merits of renting digital TV. What more could you want? That’s rhetorical, by the way.

Gareth Mason
Editor
What Video & TV May 1999

UPFRONT:

A FREE MASON

If I write one more editorial about digital TV deals, you can hang me up with a Scart lead and leave me till they switch off analogue broadcasting. But those news-mongers at Ondigital have forced our hands once more. The terrestrial digital broadcaster has picked up BskyB’s gauntlet by offering free STBs, with the proviso of signing up to an increased pay-TV package. With that gesture of resignation, we can look forward to Sky, Ondigital and the cable companies creating a package which convinces even conservative consumers that digital is a step worth taking. Fingers crossed.

AV playmate of the month must be Hitachi with two more innovative products: first the C32W35TN TV, which uses the Progressive Scan technology we urged the company to bring to the UK when first glimpsed two years ago; and second, the VT-FX880, the first VCR to play the programmes you want without the adverts you don’t.

Also on display are some of the hottest new players evolving from the DVD world, and the usual eclectic mix of products. They range from VideoLogic’s budget Dolby Digital package to a 52in home cinema experience you can wear on your head. And, as it’s my last issue, it really will be the last time I write an editorial about digital TV. So, the next person to occupy this AV throne will have to find a more ingenious way to avoid it. I shall leave you in good hands.
My physical appearance in last month’s Upfront may have shocked a few, most of all myself – the parallels with the Sophie Rhys-Jones affair are uncanny. And no, of course it wasn’t a mocked-up picture. Happy reading and may all your purchase be bargains.

Gareth Mason
Editor
What Video and TV August 1999  

Editorial:

E&M

Rumour had it relations between the paper industry and associated pressure groups were thawing. This is not the impression given by events in London over the past week when Greenpeace UK suggested at a press conference, which excluded the major protagonists, that Canada would become the ‘Brazil of the North’ if clearcutting policies continued.

The aggrieved parties, the Canadian Pulp and Paper Industry and MacMillan Bloedel, chief recipient of the malpractice allegations, were quick to issue statements, and sufficient concern was evident for the premier of British Colombia, Mike Harcourt, to make an appearance on their behalf.

This is the UK launch of a campaign that began in Germany and which resulted in paper users such as Gruner & Jahr and Otto Versand pledging not to buy the Canadian product. It coincides with the release in Germany of a Greenpeace publication ‘Paper – natural product or chemical cocktail?’ This less than conciliatory tone is at odds with the belief that the warring factions are currently enjoying a détente.

Suggestions – on the one hand, that the paper trade represents a ‘soft’ target, and on the other, that Greenpeace may have a point – should not be written off.
The argument is not as clear as the alleged destruction meted out on the Clayoquot Sound region but the implications, for both industry and landscape, are very serious. It is not dissimilar to the chlorine-free debate where progress is undermined by marketing campaigns that confirm customers prejudices.

Perhaps the industry could use a third party as intermediary where the expertise from both sides could forge a more definitive road to progress. Their collective marketing skills would be invaluable in persuading the public to follow it.

The paternal touch might have to come from stringent and better informed legislation. The Forest Practices code, a discussion paper from the British Columbian government, is a good starting point. This way, the common aim of conservation might not be submerged by a counter-productive urge to outwit the opposition.

Gareth Mason                 
Deputy Editor February 1994     

Voyages Into The Unknown

An exploration using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the experiences of returning voluntary migrants

Authors: Gareth Mason and Denise Lelitro

Abstract: This study draws on Interpretative Phenomenological Interpretation (IPA) to reflect the experience of voluntary migration and return by exploring the experiences of four British men. Voluntary migrants are understood as those who are not politically or economically driven.

The findings draw on a wide range of literature including relevant autobiographical, fictional and anthropological work to offset the lack of psychological writing on voluntary migration.
Nine major themes emerged. These include travelling as a heroic quest; growth through challenging experience; struggles re-assimilating; and the search for a more satisfying home. Home and belonging emerge as nebulous manifold concepts encompassing spiritual and emotional aspirations beyond its physical dimensions. The study identified early background and life experiences as crucial influences in the outcomes of living abroad and resettling in their native country and hopes to aid therapeutic practice by illuminating these connections.

Keywords: Migration, Abroad, Home, Return, Belonging, Identity

LITERATURE REVIEW

Mythology and religion have influenced much of the psychological writing referenced. The Bible discusses exilic themes in terms of reward or punishment such as Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden or Abraham’s call to the Promised Land.

Trials are another major theme as exemplified by mythological heroes such as Odysseus, who perhaps best exemplifies the physical and psychological struggles of adventuring far from home (Homer, 1946), or the Biblical testing of Abraham or Job. Campbell too discussed the ‘hero’s’ journey from the call to adventure to trials and transformation (1988/1949). This was supported by Jung’s transpersonal work particularly the archetypes of our Collective Unconscious (1951).

The Grinbergs (1984) suggest Biblical and mythological exile stories enshrine early societal practices to avoid conflict – such as the taboos of parricide and incest discussed by Freud (2010/1899) in the Oedipal myth. Campbell says myths personified in tribal rituals validate the individual within a cohesive society although ‘indifference, revolt or exile – break the vitalising correctives’ (1988/1949, p.383). But he also implies seekers of wisdom do not always lose their connection with society. Such individuals can uncover ‘the essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one’ (p.386). He cites the ‘ascetic medieval saints and yogis of India’ (p.385) discovering a ‘universal consciousness’. A respected place may thus exist for these solitary figures – even an active role – as shaman or priest, or their modern scientific equivalents: doctors and teachers, who now draw more on scientific than sacred learning.  Jung (1948) proposed symbols ‘protect a person from a direct experience of god… but if he leaves home and family, lives too long alone, and gazes too deeply into the dark mirror, then the awful event of the meeting may befall him’ (p.59). If the quest far from home presents dangers, the changes wrought may make return problematic too.

While psychological studies on voluntary migration are limited, the Grinbergs' work (1984) is sufficiently comprehensive to include themes on both forced and voluntary migrations. Kernberg’s foreword highlights its exploration of ‘the unconscious processes activated in the individual as… [they] face the challenges of leaving one world behind and adapting to a new one’ (p.ii), and their attention to the significance of social and cultural factors, age and language. They draw heavily on Freud, Klein, Bowlby, Winnicott and Bion in discussing how defences, object relations, and attachment theory can explain conditions such as loneliness and psychosis and how migration can lead to identity crises or enlightenment.

Also discussed is Balint’s classification of people as ocnophilic or philobatic personalities (1959) defined roughly as those seeking respectively either the familiar and stable, or the new and exciting. Balint believed voluntary migrants are usually philobatic.

Mahler et al’s work on separation-individuation (2008/1975) is also referenced, explaining how attachment issues can precipitate psychosis in migrants. Elsewhere, Huntington (1981) draws on Bowlby, Bion and Winnicott to explain how separation anxiety is heightened in strange situations – a situation exemplified by migration when dislocation from a secure base exacerbates poor childhood attachments.

Madison (2010) draws on eclectic sources in exploring voluntary migration from an existential perspective. He describes intangible ideas such as Freud’s uncanny (1919) or Heidegger’s unheimlich (1962/1927) referring to respectively something frightening but familiar, and not feeling at-home. Heidegger’s concepts of dasein, authenticity and fallen-ness are also usefully explored. Madison says ‘the experience of the unheimlich discloses that we drift along in life without a foundational ground, forever cadavering towards annihilation’ (2010, p.227). Despite the grim language, this represents an interesting counterpoint to the psychoanalytic view. We understand not-being-at-home as the state from which angst calls us to recover dasein from its lost-ness in everyday thinking (Heidegger, 1962/1927). We discern a connection here with mythological ideas – such as the ‘call of conscience’, and existential migrants as ‘heroes’ (Madison, 2010). Perhaps it's no co-incidence that many young travellers boast of being ‘authentic travellers’ rather than mere ‘tourists’.

The relative dearth of specific psychological literature was partially offset by examining the escapades of some literary travellers who highlighted issues and motivations common to voluntary migration. Leigh Fermor’s hopeful pioneer set out across Europe 'like a tramp or… like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight… all of a sudden this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do’ (1977, p.12). Meanwhile, Lee highlighted the ambivalence of uprooting oneself while ‘taunted by echoes of home’ (1971, p.13).

The journalist Kapuściński (2008) explored the colourful but difficult realities presented by distant exotic lands. He was influenced by Levinas, a holocaust survivor who studied under Heidegger and Husserl, who believed ‘The Self is only possible through the recognition of the other’ (p.5). Kapuściński believed self-hood was realised by communing with the other on an individual and global level comparing difficult childhoods and later life problems with historical events affecting societal relations. He believed multicultural communities offered a more positive otherness and quotes the philosopher Tischner, who adapts the Cartesian slogan to ‘I know that I am, because I know another is’ (2006, p.209). 

Hoffman and Said wrote seminal autobiographies about emigration. Said’s memoir (1999) details the melange of influences that created his hybrid identity. His statement: ‘the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever’ sums up its rather depressing tone. Hoffman’s work (1998/1989) evokes her struggle towards assimilation after leaving Poland for the Americas. Fjellestad (1995, p.135) says Hoffman’s story challenges the ‘romantic illusion of unity and centre and of the costs and rewards, the joys and terrors, of being thrown into a post-modern world of constantly shifting boundaries and borderless possibilities’. In describing her relationship with a lover, Hoffman says ‘we explain ourselves like texts. We learn to read each other as one learns to decipher hieroglyphs’ and with a nod to Heidegger’s unheimlich, how after the stereotypes fall away, ‘he becomes familiar, only increasing the wonderment that the familiar should be so unfamiliar, the close so far away’ (p.190).

Hoffman describes her homesickness and nostalgia for post-war Krakow, saying ‘it throws a film over everything around me, and directs my vision onwards’ (p.115). Hoffman later describes herself as visibly ‘a member of a post-war international class’ without feeling it (p.170). During psycho-analysis, she completes her understanding of the English-speaking world, integrating her Polish and American selves following the trauma of culture shock.     

METHODOLOGY

A constructionist paradigm seemed appropriate for uncovering multiple truths with its emphasis on reality being socially created rather than existing as an external singular entity (Hansen, 2004). According to Ponterotto (2005), constructionism uses a hermeneutical approach to draw out deeper meanings via reflection, particularly researcher interaction.

Ontologically, this relativistic position is subjective and influenced by individual experience and perceptions, and social environment. We accept, therefore, that results will differ if the study was interpreted by different researchers, as no single truth exists (Finlay, 2016) – the study's value drawing on the ‘thickness’ of descriptions (Ponterotto, 2005).

Epistemologically, the relationship between ‘knower and would-be-knower’ (Ponterotto, p.127), represented by participant and researcher in IPA is central. Constructionism states reality is socially created – so the dynamic is crucial. Similarly, in axiological terms, researcher values are inevitably enmeshed in the process so a personal and subjective rhetorical structure – such as IPA – that details the thoughts and feelings of both people seems appropriate (ibid).

A phenomenological method was chosen as it considers both cognitions and emotions – the embodied aspect often being overlooked in psychological theory (Smith el al, 2009). IPA was also favoured for its value in investigating identity and health issues. Furthermore, we did not plan to create theory. IPA also links interpretation with mainstream psychological thinking; to investigate cognitions and emotions where mainstream psychology treats them separately; and to look at deeper levels of reflection more than other qualitative approaches (Smith, 1996).   

The researchers’ time abroad inspired the study so we remain mindful of our influence as reflexive researchers. As bracketing is intrinsic to phenomenology, we followed Ashworth’s advice to set aside scientific theories, the truth or falsity of participants’ claims, and personal views and experiences (1996). Nonetheless, Giorgi admits: ‘Nothing can be accomplished without subjectivity so its elimination is not the solution’ (1994, p.205), while du Plock describes ‘the notion of the neutral objective researcher’ as ‘absurd’ (2016, p.16).

THE PARTICIPANTS

In keeping with IPA’s tendency to analyse small detailed purposive samples, we limited participation to four men from a relatively homogeneous demographic – the implications are discussed in the findings. Smith says: ‘IPA studies are conducted on a relatively small sample sizes, and the aim is to find a reasonably homogenous sample, so that, within the sample, we can examine convergence and divergence in some detail’ (2009, p.3). Furthermore, as the dissertation on which the paper is based was one of the author’s first IPA study, we quote Smith saying: ‘our advice to a newcomer to IPA is to try to obtain a group which is pretty homogeneous’ (p.50).

The target group were UK natives, who had lived full-time overseas for more than three years and spent over a year back in the UK to allow exploration of the ‘before and after’ periods of their experience. The field was narrowed to men between the ages of 40-45 to decrease sample variables although differences exist in time spent both overseas and back in the UK. All four are white, but colour was not a criteria. Social class was not part of the selection process while the interviews revealed significant differences in parental income, profession, and quality of upbringing.    

THE INTERVIEWEES

Findings

The Analysis

Our IPA analysis followed the five stages suggested by Smith, Flowers & Larkin (2009). Briefly, these are reading and re-reading transcripts; initial noting; developing emergent themes; connection across emergent themes; and discerning patterns across cases. Primarily, we analysed the transcripts from descriptive, linguistic and conceptual perspectives (ibid).
The master themes were identified after completing the interviews. Themes relevant only to one individual participant were discarded – some of these omissions are discussed in the conclusions. The master themes reflected patterns across the interviews – each distinguished by significant emotional or cognitive resonance. We were mindful of not lending greater weight to themes reflecting the literature review or our own experiences.

This process involved substantial re-reading of transcripts and reworking of the material. Ultimately, the emerging superordinate themes listed below reflected the chronology of the participants’ lives as revealed by the interviews although this was a natural outcome rather than planned. The first subordinate themes involved childhoods and motivation; the second, aspects of the experience abroad; and the third looked at re-assimilation into British society.

1) MASTER THEMES

Discussion

1.1) Escape from Childhood

The Grinbergs say travel can be an escape from home rather than heading towards a destination (1984). Daniel’s travelling seemed to need the complement of psychological ‘inner journeying’ (Madison, 2010) to escape the past. For Alan and Daniel, frequent movement between unsatisfying early environments combined with insecure parental attachments (Bowlby, 1960). Alan says of his home: ‘Emotionally and spiritually, there was quite a lot of discord’.

Home for Daniel appears less a place than a loving community. He says: ‘I rejected a part of the rural part of E- that we lived in because it represented such a difficult time’. When migration failed to discover what felt like a home, he seemed to experience aspects of the unheimlich (Heidegger, 1962/1927) and the uncanny (Freud, 1919).

All four subscribe to a ‘long-harboured desire’ for sustained adventure (Grinbergs, 1984, p.58). For Alan and Daniel specifically: ‘lack of containment and support may precipitate psychosis, perversion, delinquency, or drug use’ (p.127) when changing environments to heal childhood problems.

1.2) The Comfort of Strangers

Madison (2010) discusses how some – like Daniel – use travelling to re-connect and progress within the world to build up confidence. Daniel says: ‘I felt very strong about Latin American issues… I had a Latin American outlook’. Succeeding away perhaps offsets feeling failure at home. Madison also suggests some flee home to avoid feeling overwhelmed, and to achieve balance between contact and isolation, and how peer rejection can be projected onto places.
Kristeva talks about foreigners representing ‘the hidden face of our identity’ (1991, p.1) and how integrating them into our unconscious releases it from a repressed pathological state. Daniel and Alan may have felt unconsciously reassured by this. 

Meanwhile, if ‘physical space allows mental space’ (Madison, 2010, p.209), Alan embraced it saying he idealised his life overseas – a common reaction that can lead to hypomania in new arrivals – its corollary often being a later collapse (Grinbergs, 1984), which Alan’s experiences also reflect when ‘stripped almost overnight of the people… [he] spent a lot of amazing times with’.  

Perhaps the common link is the desire to self-actualise (Maslow, 1954) coupled with their rejection of a constraining tribal loyalty. All four were attracted to the exotic – perhaps their own spiritual mystery, and identity, was better matched with their chosen destination than their first homes (Madison, 2010).

1.3) The International Man

Barry and Malcolm’s international perspective is reflected by their being-at-home in more than one place as if they transcended home and foreign culture rather than being subsumed by either. Barry says: ‘I always try to see myself as an international person… I like freedom’.
Alan and Daniel perhaps took longer to achieve this due to their initial rejection of home. Madison describes how ‘dual belonging’ (2010, p.103) can resolve the tension between a strong self-identity and sense of belonging.

Alan’s national identity is less obvious as his peers share interests rather than cultures or places saying ‘British culture became a culture shock to me because I had lived a European life’. Or as Madison (2010) suggests, perhaps Alan avoids isolation by grouping with internationalists equally unattached to home countries. 

Daniel’s fragile attachment to Britain seems linked to his lack of belonging to family and early homes – an assumption Madison (2010) also identifies.

2) KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER

2.1) University of Life

Madison says intellectual studies – such as those later displayed by Daniel and Malcolm – are examples of ‘journeying inwards’ (2010, p.105), while early failure is identified by Alan’s admission that ‘a lot of us could have done better academically than we did’ when faced with the choice of ‘going surfing for the weekend or sitting around doing your pure maths homework’. Freud said the sublimation of studying, a mature version of displacing the libido, was ‘what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilised life’ (1930, p.79).

Daniel didn’t pursue medicine to regulate his libido, but his long-simmering intellectual frustration seems usefully channelled into study! For him ‘studying medicine is as thrilling and as much an adventure as travelling’.

Madison (2010) sees compassion for the underdog – demonstrated by all four – as a complement to a personal fight for independence, while Hoffman (1998) talks of exiles creatively reviewing life’s mysteries from abroad – perhaps enhanced by the extra time and space often available.          

2.2) Lust for Life

All were drawn to what Heidegger might describe as authentic experiences (1962/1927) and prioritising adventure over financial security (Madison, 2010). Barry says: ‘I had this something in me, which I had picked up in America, this sort of lust for life’. Daniel says: ‘there were no bounds to what I did’, while Malcolm ‘revelled in complete freedom’.
Madison’s words could apply to all four: ‘To not be free is to not be alive. In leaving I am embracing my freedom and independence through movement’ (2010, p.270). When he says ‘I have a felt direction more than a felt goal; it is a journey with no set destination, slowly I entertain that the journey is the destination’ (ibid), it particularly reflects the paths of Alan and Daniel. 

Balint (1959) might highlight the interviewees’ philobatic nature – due to their movement towards new and exciting experiences, but we feel this is balanced by their stated ocnophilic attachments to people and places, home and abroad.

2.3) The Heroic Test

The participants often described their journeys using mythological language.
With Daniel, we perceived parallels between his life stages, and the trials of the archetypal mythological hero, namely: a peripatetic childhood; uncertain ancestry beyond his adopted parents; restless ‘drifting’; his desire for ‘transformation’; a passage through ‘madness’; a ‘magical’ chosen land; and his role as teacher, and later doctor, allowing him to be ‘a part of society, actually fulfilling a useful role professionally and personally’. He sought a ‘transformative’ experience that would make him: ‘a different, more independent, more exciting, more worldly person’. Of his chosen professions, Jung’s ‘wounded healer’ (1951) suggests itself, as does the shaman who harnesses skills that set him apart. ‘It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero’, says Campbell, ‘but precisely the reverse’ (p.391).

The ‘purification of the self’ after an individual undertakes ‘the perilous journey… into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth’ could reflect Daniel’s positive transformation following a ‘manic psychosis’. Campbell describes ‘the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past’ (p.101). This chimes with Daniel’s improved interaction with the world. Daniel’s travelling ambitions also reminded me of the pleasure-seeking Peer Gynt (Ibsen, 1964/1876), whose eponymous protagonist pursues hedonistic impulses unreflectively. The ‘decadence’ of Daniel’s pleasure-seeking, however, led to disillusionment, and later, a life ‘more fulfilling than the experiences I had there’.

Malcolm’s Panglossian optimism reminded us of the protagonist Karl in Kafka’s Amerika (1996/1927). Nonetheless, he survives well, treating triumph and disaster with equal equanimity and dreams of his family ‘returning like conquering heroes’. He was also reminiscent of the footloose writers, Lee and Leigh Fermor. Leigh Fermor (1977/1947) flipped cheerfully between barns and castle turrets in his peregrinations, while Malcolm was equally at home in an anarchist squat as a millionaire’s chateau.

Barry’s attitude fits the role of Master of the Two Worlds (Campbell, 2004/1949) exercising ‘freedom to pass back and forth across the world division’ (p.229) and refers to his ‘calling’ to London and the ‘magical’ American world.

3) END OF THE DREAM

3.1) A Life more Ordinary

Page claims ‘re-entry shock is as powerful as culture shock’ (1990, p.181) and how denying these difficulties often results in disillusionment. Brislin (ibid) says re-adjusting to home is often hardest for those who integrated well overseas. Alan returns to a provincial ‘desert’ where ‘pretty much everyone had left’. The reverse condition, Postponed Depression Syndrome (Grinbergs, 1984), could be applied to Alan for his difficulties abroad after initially immersing himself successfully.

Madison (2010, p.178) identifies how returning migrants often feel ‘exotic’, but his emphasis is on visiting rather than permanent resettlement. He also suggests migrants may feel superior to those left behind, if also envious of their material gains. My interviewees tended to feel or be seen as exotic when abroad. This is reminiscent of Hoffman feeling an ‘exotic stranger’ in the US and ‘excited by my own otherness, which surrounds me like a bright, somewhat inflated bubble’ (1998, p.179). The interviews suggest the novelty of homecoming was short-lived perhaps representing a fallen-ness from a more authentic existence abroad (Heidegger, 1962/1927). Daniel laments: ‘I identified as being somebody who had lived abroad in a dangerous place that impressed people, and once that was taken away I just felt like another schmuck’.

For Daniel and Alan, return was heralded by the ‘dying’ of foreign worlds. The Grinbergs (1984) noted how returning exiles fall prey to doubt even when the homecoming is cherished. They quote the expressions coined by a Spanish journalist: ‘to be in the throes of de-exile’ and ‘the wound of return’ (Torres, 1983), and cite one returnee who said ‘I don’t feel I belong in either place’ (p.184).

Regarding Alan, the perceived negative reaction of the homeworld with his ‘long hair [and] ridiculous suntan’ was perhaps reminiscent of the reception Turkish workers reported after working in Germany when mocked as Alamanyali or German-like (Mandel, 2008).

3.2) Paradise Lost

The burning of this bridge to the dwelling place of others left Alan and Daniel caught between two worlds – a common situation identified by Madison (2010).

This sense of failure perhaps deepened early psychological fissures. Metaphorically, they return empty-handed rather than triumphantly bearing the hard-won ‘elixir’ (Campbell, 2004/1949). Daniel described his dissolution abroad almost like a personal expulsion from Eden claiming the loss of ‘a whole dimension of my character’, while Malcolm says: ‘I've left a bit of my heart in France’. The Grinbergs (1984) suggest migration can release latent pathology – something applicable to Daniel’s experiences on his outward and return journeys.

Of work, Alan was ‘sick and tired of just making money and working my balls off for other people’ at ‘what’s supposed to be a grown-up age’ and that ‘the veneer was starting to peel away’. This is similar to migrants feeling infantilised abroad where their qualifications and experience have little value (Grinbergs, 1984).

3.3) Life through a new Lens

For Daniel and Alan, something of Freud’s uncanny (1919) is glimpsed in their re-acquaintance with former worlds, previously taken for granted, while Heidegger’s unheimlich can be observed in their sense of not being-at-home (1962/1927) – even if this represents a continuation of their unsatisfying relationship with Britain.

Madison (2010) discusses how many migrants need to believe home has not changed to preserve their roots. Daniel, however, was disturbed by the lack of perceived change – referring to his dislike of ‘the millennia old inequalities’.

Alan’s wary response to the digital age echoes Heidegger’s warning that technological ‘progress’ –  epitomised by a skyline redolent with television aerials – reduces the world to a state of homelessness by ushering the public into our private homes (1961). Malcolm, however, positively reflected that ‘I've made myself over there and turned into someone who can actually operate over here’.

CONCLUSIONS

We initially expected the interviews to produce themes exclusively related to the experience of being and returning from overseas. However, issues concerned with the upbringing and background of the participants proved to be significant influences on motives for living overseas, and the quality of the overseas’ experience and resettlement.

Summary of Master themes

Under (1) Finding Home Abroad, the subordinate theme (1a) Escape from Childhood divided the participants into two camps: those running from unsatisfying home environments versus those whose secure base let them happily wander further afield. Thriving in unfamiliar territory was explored in (1b) The Comfort of Strangers; while (1c) The International Man discussed the evolution of their worldly identities.   

Within (2) Kings of the Wild Frontier, we examined a tendency to reject formal education in favour of life experience in (2a) University of Life; the embracing of adventure and hedonism in (2b) Lust for Life; while (2c) The Heroic Quest reflected the interpretation – consciously or otherwise – of identity in mythical metaphors.

(3) End of the Dream dealt with post-migration experience. (3a) Paradise Lost focussed on the repercussions of closing the chapter on a meaningful period of life; while (3b) A Life more Ordinary highlighted the anti-climax of returning to an old world after expanding one’s horizons in a new one. Finally, (3c) Life through a new Lens explored how each constructed a new existence in the UK after assimilating experiences abroad.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY

This study of voluntary migration aims to help those leaving, those left behind – and therapists – better understand its purpose and value.

Therapeutically, we identified the value of immersing oneself in the whole subjective story of the voluntary migrant. For example, Daniel and Alan reported far more emotional turmoil than their co-participants as their migration encompassed much more than their time abroad. Answering the call to adventure was perhaps one of a series of trials and life-changing experiences that helped establish their identity. The crucible of travel, if sometimes perilous, forged their authentic selves. Their experiences, spanning many years, were perhaps not dissimilar to the process of insightful therapy. Meanwhile, the study underlined how the relatively charmed upbringings of Malcolm and Barry contributed to a fulfilling overseas venture.

Cooper Marcus said ‘when we start to seek a broader home in another place, it is likely that the soul is demanding recognition’ (1995, p.252). The drive for unplanned open-ended travel often seems motivated by such intangible mystical forces. For Daniel and Alan, self-actualisation took place on the long and winding road rather than a conventional straight path.

While respecting individual choice, a therapist might usefully explore the underlying issues ­– such as the sense of belonging – that motivate such ventures. This may more directly initiate the healing process than years spent wandering away from the home world. Exploring the personal meanings of home may facilitate it. Journeying inwardly through study, self-improvement, or social activism – as demonstrated by Daniel – may be satisfying alternatives.
Returnees devaluing their experience may benefit from being reminded of the insights they have gained, which may be lost if they are pre-occupied by what they feel they have lost through absence. Otherwise, in its ignorance of their experiences, the home world is likely to reinforce this negative feeling. Furthermore, if the original home feels diminished, perhaps it is because the boundaries that enclosed it have shifted. The dizzying possibilities that now emerge may be viewed fearfully, but can also be re-viewed as symptoms of a more meaningful and authentic existence (Heidegger, 1962/1927).

The Grinbergs say ‘One never goes back, one always goes toward’ (1984, p.216). Those more changed than their home world may benefit from seeking a new more flexible environment for their expanded consciousness. Rapport and Dawson suggest migration can be a ‘creative act’ (1998, p.209) and ‘in displacement lies a route to personal empowerment’ (2003, p.51), something which all the participants grew from in different degrees.

If the wisdom gleaned abroad is made central to one’s new life, it builds on this valuable knowledge rather than wastefully bracketing if off like some invalid reality. Some may relish their experiences as little more than fireside tales, but voluntary migrants who enthusiastically embraced the other may wisely build on these foundations e.g. by using language skills, cultural knowledge or seizing entrepreneurial opportunities. Therapists can foreground these skills lest they be forgotten. 

Myriad practical factors influence the outcomes of voluntary migration such as age, gender, status, social and cultural support – along with the destination and provenance of the traveller (Brislin, 1990). Also important are access to home; ethnicity, religion, race; education, and work skills (ibid). Making potential voluntary migrants aware of how these variables may affect them could later earn them rich dividends.

But ultimately, to many voluntary migrants, fine-tuning the variables perhaps cheats the challenge of heeding the call, which for good or worse, must be braved. For both the supportive therapist of the voluntary migrant, and the often uncomprehending friends and family, this irrational but irrepressible motivation is perhaps the most important factor to accept and understand.

LIMITATIONS AND FURTHER STUDY

Some significant issues suggested by the literature were not investigated as they were not prioritised by the participants. They include loss, which was tangible during Alan’s interview, and writers such as Hoffman (1998), concerning paths not taken. Another is the isolation felt by strangers in a strange land – largely not experienced by our participants; likewise, struggles with integration which my interviewees dealt with largely well. Culture shock was articulated by Alan, but in reference to his return rather than departure.

Space considerations forced me to abandon some interesting – but less supported – themes. These included enhanced economic and social status abroad, the experiences of partners and family, or even the frustration of one’s life-changing stories being met with indifference back home. Others emerged after the interviews, relatively unexplored, such as the impact on identity of learning foreign languages; nocturnal dream worlds; re-inventing oneself in an alien environment; or psychosomatic symptoms attached to emotional trauma. Space considerations also required us to remove many participant quotes; non-psychological, but relevant literature from the review; further detail on methodology etc. which were present in the original dissertation.  

A further study could extend the age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and participant numbers. For example, the themes of Heroic Quest and Lust for Life – well supported by the participants – seem rather stereotypically male. Conversely, a single case study might reveal much by probing deeper into the psyche of one individual. As our participants were similarly-aged white men from a rich Western nation, the results are clearly skewed – we would like to see what is retained with different variables particularly when more participants further iron out the idiosyncratic differences. Even within this narrow demographic, we realise the criteria might benefit from further tightening such as the differences in the places visited, time spent there, and the age of the travellers.

The symptoms discussed, if not the causes, may be reflected by political and economic migrants and those studying or posted overseas. For them, universities and company resettlement programmes may help as do reception centres for refugees, but these options may be randomly available and mere Band-Aids for deeper individual wounds. Future migration studies may benefit from greater emphasis on the individual rather than generalised mass movements (Rapport & Dawson, 1998).

FINAL THOUGHTS

Overall, the participants with a more secure base had fewer problems abroad and in resettling. For the participants whose upbringing was more difficult being abroad might have represented an escape, but it did not necessarily compensate positively for this lack – indeed their issues were often highlighted and amplified abroad. Nonetheless, the conscious act of leaving seems to represent an attempt to overcome this adversity, which allowed them to ultimately understand, accept and grow from it. We also feel that the project benefitted from the positive experiences reported in understanding the factors behind a rewarding voluntary migration.
IPA’s value in investigating issues such as belonging and identity was also highlighted – the interviews largely underpinned these evolving themes. For example, Barry’s childhood home was a happy, nurturing place. It didn’t change, but he did, and the world of cosmopolitan cities became his natural milieu. His harmonious and accessible dual world, which home has become is now varied enough to contain his needs. For Alan, home revolved around shared activities with like-minded companions. His presence in the family home was more of an intrusion than a belonging so it is unsurprising he has grown up adaptable, independent, and unsentimental about childhood. Malcolm’s young adult home was a moveable feast founded on a liberal and nurturing home base, which allowed him to fearlessly seek new adventures elsewhere without needing to escape it. Being abroad gave Daniel the freedom to live fully and create the essence denied by early deprivation, but his travelling experiences were insufficient to make him feel he belonged. His home is now founded on a mutually loving and supportive family – what he lacked as a child.

Traditionally, we believe the lack of psychological literature on voluntary migration reflects a belief that it represents a pathological deviation from the ‘normality’ of settled life. While globalisation increasingly encourages temporary and semi-permanent freedom of movement, we feel an acceptance of migration as an on-going ‘alternative human history’ (Madison, 2010, p.222) will redress this now out-dated bias towards a sedentary life.

Given the freedom to undertake these voyages, the participants all felt compelled to leave one home, to discover another. If they had not done so, we suspect their destinies would feel unfulfilled.

References
Ashworth, P. (1996) Presuppose nothing! The suspension of assumptions in phenomenological psychological methodology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. 27 (1). 1-25.
Balint, M. (1959) Thrills and Regression. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Bowlby, J. (1960) Separation Anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 41. 89.
Brislin, R.W. (ed.) (1990) Applied Cross-cultural Psychology Cross-cultural Research and Methodology Series. 14. Newbury Park CA: Sage.  
Campbell, J. (2004) [1949] The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
du Plock, S. (2016) Where am I with my research? Harnessing reflexivity for practice-based inquiry. The Psychotherapist. 62. 16-18.
Finlay, L. (2016) Being a therapist-researcher: doing relational-reflexive research. The Psychotherapist. 62. 6-8.
Freud, S. (2010) [1899] The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, S. (1930) Civilisation and its Discontents in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (trans. Strachey, J.) vol. XXI, 79–80. Hogarth Press: London.

Freud, S. (1919) The Uncanny. (trans. Strachey, J.) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [1955]: 219: 252 Vol. XVIII [1917-1919] An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth. Giorgi, A. (1994) A phenomenological perspective on certain qualitative research methods. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. 25 (2). 190-220. Grinberg, L. and Grinberg, H. (1984). Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile. Yale New Haven and London: University Press. Hansen, J.T. (2004) Thoughts on Knowing: Epistemic implications of counselling practice. Journal of Counselling & Development. 82.131-138. Heidegger, M. (1961) [1953] An Introduction to Metaphysics. (trans. Mannheim, R.). New York: Doubleday. Heidegger, M. (1962) [1927] Being and Time. (trans. Macquarrie, J. & Robinson, E.). New York: Harper & Row. Hoffman, E. (1998) [1989] Lost in Translation. London: Vintage. Homer. (1946) [8th Century BC] The Odyssey. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Huntington, J. (1981) Migration as a part of life experience. Paper presented at the NSW institute of Psychiatry, Seminar in cross cultural therapy. Ibsen, H. (1964) [1876] Peer Gynt. New York: Signet. Jung, C. (1948) The Integration of the Personality. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Kafka, F. (1996) [1927] Amerika. London: Penguin. Kapuściński, R. (2008) The Other. Verso: Krakow. Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lee, L. (1971) As I Walked out one Midsummer Morning. London: Penguin. Leigh Fermor, P. (1977) [1947] A Time of Gifts. London: John Murray. Madison, G. (2010) Existential Migration: Voluntary migrants’ experience of not being-at-home in the world. Saarbrücken: Lap Lambert. Mahler, M., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (2008) [1975] The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. New York: Basic Books. Mandel, R. (2008) Cosmopolitan Anxieties. Durham: Duke University Press. Marcus, C.C. (1995) House as a Mirror of Self – exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Berkley, CA: Conari Press. Maslow, A. (1954) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper. Ponterotto, J.G. (2005) Qualitative Research in Counselling Psychology: A Primer on Research Paradigms and Philosophy of Science. Journal of Counselling Psychology. 52 (2). 126-136. Rapport, N. (2003) I am Dynamite: An alternative Anthology of Power. London: Routledge. Rapport, N. and Dawson, A. (1998) Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Said, E.W. (1999) Out of Place. London: Granta. Smith, J. (1996) Beyond the divide between cognition and discourse: using interpretative phenomenological analysis in health psychology. Psychology and Health. 11. 261-271.

Smith, J., Flowers, P. & Larkin, M. (2009) Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. London: Sage. Tischner, J. (2006) Filozofia Dramatu. (trans. Lloyd-Jones) A. Krakow: Znak. Torres, M. (1983) Newspaper article. El País (Madrid). December 4, 1983.

Author biography:
Gareth Mason is a UKCP psychotherapist working privately and within the NHS. He spent over 20 years working as a journalist in Britain and overseas. He is a graduate from Regent’s University's MA and Advanced Diploma programmes. Denise Lelitro is a lecturer in psychoanalytic studies at Regent’s University and has a private practice in North London.

Walking With Camcorders

Gareth Mason raises a bushy eyebrow and wonders if a new millennium is a good place for a 20th century format…

With the emergence of digital, the VHS-C format doesn’t have the support it once had. In fact, that dwindling minority inhabiting this world are perhaps the AV equivalents of a Neanderthal man scratching his oversized forehead with bemusement at the more successful antics of the smaller, hairless wonders frolicking around him. But evolution does, for a time, allow such species to live alongside each other. In the AV world, this is usually due to older formats dropping their prices so that their higher value outweighs their antiquity.

At £400, the NV-VZ15 a close relative of the NV-RZ15 but adding a 2.5in colour LCD, is near the bottom of the price chain. But its existence still raises an overgrown eyebrow. For instance, the demo mode greets you with the repeated phrase: ‘Yes, it’s VHS!’ a statement which begs the response ‘Yes, but surely you’re extinct?!’. The same mode repeatedly drops that frighteningly modern ‘d’ word into its conversation whenever quality performance needs to be empathised with vague onscreen outbursts such as ‘digital process’ and ‘high quality by digital’. Is this species envy trying to tell us something? And can VHS-C still justify its continued life when the price-friendly ‘high-band’ formats of S-VHS-C and Hi8 offer a comparable, if significantly lower, performance than digital?

Design and layout

Pushing the scales at over a kilogram with battery, the bulk of the NV-VZ15 is not for the limp-wristed and contrasts sharply with the wonders of miniaturisation. That said, it’s still loyal to the traditional sleek lines of Panasonic though you might have to look at it through a telescope backwards for it to look truly cute.

It’s relatively devoid of features on each side; most are found front left where two buttons and a wheel control the menu functions. Moving about these is straightforward enough though it would be more intuitive if the wheel could make selections when pressed in thus avoiding the need to use three buttons to do one thing. The wheel also doubles for tracking and, in tandem with the ‘Set’ button, for Manual focus. Above these, selections can be made for one of the five Program AE modes, Fader functions or electronic image stabiliser – the last of which we’d recommend as a default.

The Program AE modes are a series of settings designed for shooting in circumstances where point and shoot recording may not get the best results. The nine Digital effects lend a more creative influence on the finished product while Fader can round off the beginning and ends of scenes in a variety of ways. But there’s some madness in the Fader method as holding the button on and off during this tortuous process requires a bit too much attention to do it well and easily.

An info window appears above these displays, rather unnecessarily, whether the camcorder is in VCR, Charge or Camera mode, the last of which is illustrated in an alarming red. Forward of this you’ll find a switch operating the 0lux function for shooting in darkness while the lens barrel opens onto an f1.8 lens with a decent 18x optical zoom – an upgrade on the 15x of last year’s model. Less serious is the 700x digital zoom. Or it would be, if all the manufacturers didn’t collude in pretending this is a useful function by plastering this meaningless statistic all over its products and literature. In reality, it contributes to good footage much as Gazza does to lucid speech.

On the lens is a kind of lens cap without a cause, which comes off easily as you test to see whether it’s a manual focussing ring. Clearly it isn’t, but, as with a well-designed bra, for the full picture, it’s often best left-on. Beneath this, you’ll find the infrared display and microphone and underneath the VZ15 itself is a tripod mounting. Talking of which, use of the tripod will not be impeded by the cassette flipping out sideways from behind the otherwise-bare wall facing the LCD monitor. Might take an eye out though.

The black and white viewfinder, while not extendible, can flip up 90 degrees. In front of it are VCR transport controls which double up for time-base correction (a standard feature for reducing jitter), and backlight compensation for scenes with too much light coming behind the subject of your shots. Pressing Record check quickly effectively slips the camcorder into VCR mode so you can test whether you did just get that once in a lifetime scene on tape or whether you just thought you pressed record. Talking of Record buttons, that can be found just below where a righty’s index finger would naturally reach just behind the Zoom switch (which also adjusts playback volume) and ahead of buttons for Date/time and Eject.

Behind the curved right-hand surface on which the VCR playback speaker is found, you’ll find the Control switch (Camera, VCR), a DC input and a flap in which composite video and mono audio is output. While the VZ15 wears most of its features on its sleeve, the menus reveal a few more, such as Motion sensor. This is designed for shooting where nothing may happen for hours such as with night-time wildlife whose sudden appearance or movement theoretically triggers the camcorder into life.

In a similar vein is Interval record in which the camcorder can be programmed to record for a certain amount of time, say one second, every say, 30 seconds. It’s easy to set up. Less exciting but more commonly used would be the Titler menu in which the language, size and colour of your message can be adjusted for each of the ten pre-set titles. On the VCR menus, there are just a couple of added extras but they are both good ones. Insert edit and audio dub are more commonly found on higher-end models. Applying to pictures and sound respectively, they allow you to replace a section of either of these, insert edit for a chunk of video without affecting the audio, while audio dub does it the other way around.

Performance

First impressions in a reasonably well-lit room were not that reasonable. Analogue artefacts blazed back at us with pictures flecked in grain that suggested a film of dust on the lens. There wasn’t one and the long play shots displayed a dot crawl which literally took the edge off things. Colours were decent enough though if glaring away from the norm in brighter light, and exaggeratedly dull elsewhere.

My yellow cushion faded, my kettle lost five years, and my face came across as more orange than usual. A low band format needs natural light to deliver pictures of decent quality for the merry amateur – the soberer semi-pro is clearly fishing further up the camcorder food chain. And here, even on a grey early November morning, they achieved that respectability.
The fuzziness of its roving auto focus was negated by cityscape shots enhanced by the slight boost of colour the camcorder gave to red brick and green grass. The zoom slid up smoothly through its indicated extremes though it wasn’t far before it starts magnifying all that grain disturbingly. Mono sound was predictably limited in range, tinny and boomy at opposite ends of the scale.

The various enhancements on offer proved a mixed bag. Manual white balance was a real boon, not only did it improve the colour balance of shots in the range which auto white balance covers but it did its job of dealing with the more extreme conditions which the manual clearly explains it’s designed for. Manual focus, though too awkward to select mid-shot, nonetheless sharpens the picture up nicely. Even if the limits of VHS-C make truly sharp pics impossible it’s a useful feature and offers a helpful alternative to the wayward auto version. Interval recording worked and you can’t ask for much more from it.

Less impressive was the backlight compensation which needs to be held down distractingly to operate and made no discernible difference in my Heath Robinson room of many light sources. But the duff feature award went to the motion sensor which generally failed the less than Herculean task of recording when something moved in front of it. Blocking the lens or swinging it round in a circle tended to work, dancing a jig or filming an earthworm eat his supper is less likely to. But ending on a bright note is the 0 lux mode, which but for the twin tracers of its infrared light, carved out a clear black and white picture from the darkness of my windowless bathroom. It’s in the same league as Sony’s Nightshot, if a couple of places down the table.

All in all, the NV-VZ15 has some interesting features for a beginner-friendly model, even if using them isn’t always as simple as it could be, and they lack consistency in their effectiveness. Performance was fine for its type but the first-time user is sacrificing an awful lot of quality to make a not substantial saving on higher band models which will comfortably outgun it for sound and pictures.

What Camcorder magazine 2002

Technology News

Boeing Scoops Raygun Contract

New weapon won’t fall off the back of a lorry
Boeing is adding further to its extensive portfolio with the contract to build a 20-tonne truck housing a laser gun. It’s designed to be parked close to vulnerable facilities such as airports, where it would shoot down enemy projectiles such as rockets, mortars, or indoctrinated clay pigeons. The solid-state electrically-powered laser is a new departure from the ‘household’ version that uses highly-poisonous chemical fuel (rather than, say, diesel).

The High Laser Technology Demonstrator contract was won by Boeing last year but the project has been given a $36 million cash injection with the planes and arms manufacturer now being asked to act as systems engineer for the weapon.

Radioactive pigeons
Boeing has already developed chemical rayguns that can be mounted on aeroplanes to take out targets hundreds of kilometres away, but the literal fall-out from such a weapon going wrong makes an electrically powered version far preferable.

Rapid-fire automatic cannon systems have been used in the past for similar defence work but these are inevitably compromised in built-up areas by the fall out of fist-sized chunks of lead that hurtle from the sky towards the soft heads of those not actively practicing terrorism.

Shooting from the truck
Boeing raygun czar Scott Fancher said: ‘This contract award is an important win for Boeing because it supports a cornerstone of the Army’s high-energy laser program, HEL TD will... counter the difficult threats posed by rockets, artillery shells and mortar projectiles.’
It may also be used in those shooting events at which the US failed to win gold, though admittedly, there’s no evidence supporting this assertion whatsoever.

Facebook Hits 100 Million

Still trails MySpace by country mile
The Facebook phenomenon officially reached the 100 million milestone today – that’s almost the equivalent of double the population of England sitting at home conducting their social lives without whispering a word out loud.

It’s reached that figure in four and a half years – 50 per cent longer than MySpace took. And for all the coverage that Facebook garners, most indications suggest that MySpace is, in the words of one website: ‘Still kicking Facebook's ass in traffic’.

Traffic analysts Hitwise supports evidence of this drubbing. It says that MySpace recieved 72 per cent compared with Facebook’s 16 per cent during 2007 in the US. Bebo trailed in a very distant third with 1.09 per cent. With those figures, MySpace could afford to drop 8 per cent on the previous year and not worry too much about the 50 per cent rise of its main rival.

Facebook trails no-one in press coverage though, possibly influenced by the site’s reputation for attracting the yuppies of the social networking world. But even with an affluent demographic, the site still has to find a way of squeezing the cash from its well-heeled customers. In his self-congratulatory Facebook blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg says: ‘We spend all our time here trying to build the best possible product that enables you to share and stay connected, so the fact that we’re growing so quickly all over the world is very rewarding.’

You can’t put a price on the rewards of friendship and maybe that compensates for the dollars, euros and pounds Zuckerberg is thus far failing to extract from the users.

Applications, get behind me!
How many of those 100 million friends will notice this momentous occasion is hard to say. Only a fifth of the members have bothered to update to the new look site that will soon be imposed on the rest of them. Furthermore, the most anticipated new application is one that hides all of its predecessors.

You can host a party, but once the invites have been sent out you can’t control when the guests turn up and what they are going to do in the swimming pool. You can’t even make them like you. Still, we won't begrudge the site a congratulatory round of cyber cocktails on us. Bottoms up!

 
Greatest Cyber Heist In History

Or tabloid muck raking: you choose
Scottish tabloid, The Sunday Herald, has announced ‘the greatest cyber-heist in world history’ – claiming an Indian hacker stole a database with the details of eight million customers from a leading international hotel chain using a Trojan Horse program.

The report calculates that up to £2.8 billion could be scooped by wrong-doers on the basis that the average internet fraud costs the victim £356. Best Western International begs to differ. The hotel group reckons ten customers were affected from just the one branch in Berlin, in whose cyberspace the hack took place. It also says that the FBI has been called in along with other international crime-fighting agencies.

Oh, those Russians!
Technology editor for the Herald, Iain Bruce, says that the hacker accessed the personal information of all the customers who visited the 1,312 European-based hotels since 2007. His story went onto claim that the database was sold onto an underground network run by the Russian mafia.

Bruce has produced screen shots that appear to reveal the hotel’s reservation system along with the guests’ personal details accessed using a tool that was able to search records back to 2007. While Bruce is sticking to his story, he has offered no proof that millions of customers details have been compromised.

Substantiate that
Meanwhile, Best Western interprets his article as being ‘grossly unsubstantiated’ and ‘largely erroneous.’ The chain claims it removes its guest details within a week of their departure though this is no guarantee that the information cannot be accessed with the right technology in the wrong hands.

TechRadar will keep you up to date to establish if this really is ‘the greatest cyber-heist in world history.’ The relative infancy of the internet over the last five million years (see Evolution) suggests the tabloid is erring on the side of hyperbole.

With 4,200 branches worldwide, Best Western claims to be the largest hotel group in the world. As well as credit cards, it accepts payment in used notes.

Games Degrees Inadequate

Industry chiefs slate UK training
Training for the games industry in the UK is not up to scratch. So say several industry bigwigs who have criticised the graduate programs available. This has turned up in a(nother) report by The Daily Mail – a media organ known for the gimlet eye it keeps on the values and machinations of the gaming world.

‘Shocked and surprised’ was the verdict of David Braben, founder of Lost Winds studio Frontier Development, when he described the skills of many of the graduates, while Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios Europe vice president Jamie MacDonald said, ‘I can’t remember the last time I employed someone from them.’

Four degrees of less obvious education
Four degree courses are officially accredited by Skillset, which represents the creative media industry. Two of these are available from the University of Abertay Dundee and one each at the University of the West of Scotland, and the Glamorgan Centre for Art & Design Technology. According to the Mail, over 80 other such degree courses exist in the UK. That gaming degrees and the name ‘Mickey Mouse’ have been linked is no great surprise particularly when the connection is made by The Daily Mail, self-appointed protector of Middle England, and crusader against change in general, and immoral video games in particular.

More than 200 British firms are joining forces to promote ‘Games Up?’ – a campaign that aims to highlight the danger to the UK's share of this lucrative £18 billion industry. TechRadar will be keeping a close eye on these developments as will, no doubt, our friends and rivals at The Daily Mail.

Add More Cowbell To Your Music

Website lets you add that crucial ingredient to your MP3s
Is your music collection lacking that Ingredient X? Are thousands of MP3s sitting listlessly on your computer and PMPs, listless and forlorn? There may be a solution. Cowbells. And Christopher Walken. In the loosest sense, science has proven that these two factors can put the lead back in your music’s collective pencil.

Bunch of comedians
This was demonstrated by a Saturday Night Live sketch from back in 2000, which has been voted one of the show’s most popular ever. The long-running show is an American institution that features comedians in sketches that appear to have been written quickly in the preceding few minutes.

The skit in question featured Christoper Walken playing music producer Bruce Dickinson alongside Will Ferrell as a fictional cowbell player, showing the band Blue Oyster Cult's attempts to record a song.

From that momentous episode the term ‘More Cowbells’ was born and Walken finally ditched Russian Roulette as his game of choice for house parties.

The happiness which that skit brought to the free world, can now be replicated in bite-sized chunks thanks to morecowbell.dj – a website that allows you to add cowbells and Walken to the uploaded MP3 of your choice. Crucially, clever sliders allow you to adjust the level of Walken or Bell that suits your personal needs.

Scent Of A Laptop

How would you like your laptop to smell? Might odours labelled Floral, Cologne, Ocean or Grass draw you amorously towards your keyboard? Might turning your computer on have a whole new connotation? Is this the ultimate computer geek's substitute for flesh and blood? Asus thinks so. Or it’s possibly just having a laugh.

The Nature part
While the guts of this laptop are nothing to get overexcited about – it’s the gimmicks that will earn it the (minor) headlines. Not only will it smell of Karate perfume, pollen, salt, or your dog’s garden deposits, but it's got a patterned lid and a carbon fibre wrist rest. The wacky designs made an appearance in Las Vegas (now it’s starting to make sense) this week as part of Project 200 in Microsoft's Spotlight on PC Fashion. Aside from the four scents, it comes in either pink, blue, green or black too.

The Science bit
The ASUS F6V is the rather prosaic name for a hunk of metal trying to be anything but. It has a 13.3in screen, Core 2 Duo processor, 320GB of storage, ATI HD 3470 graphics card, fingerprint authentication, HDMI port, and 1.2MP webcam. It’s available from Amazon for $1,300. You want more? We’d advise you to check out the website. I mean – look at the headline – did you really think this was a review?

Palin Covers Digital Tracks In US Election

Pythonesque subterfuge over Troopergate
Hockey mum and US Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is not looking as transparent in her political dealings as she would like us to think.

The woman with whom Republican nominee John McCain hopes to lead the US in some direction or other is refusing to hand over more than a thousand emails in connection with an investigation into ‘Troopergate’.

The latest ‘gated’ controversy concerns her allegedly prominent role in the firing of her former brother-in-law, and his boss. Both appeared to be motivated less for professional reasons and more for the temerity of falling out with the Palin clan.

Let there be transparency!
Pro-reformer Palin is claiming executive privilege despite the fact that many of the emails were clearly nothing to do with sensitive state business. Using unofficial email accounts such as gov.sarah@yahoo.com and devices such as BlackBerries, she is seeking to avoid letting the courts see them as public records.

This is a tactic that was taught by the angels of the lord, the Big G himself. We refer, of course, to White House aides protecting George Dubya from prying investigators over the allegedly political firing of government lawyers.

The same administration 'lost' millions of emails after an ‘upgrade’ to the White House system shortly after George Bush ‘won’ his first election. (We should point out the excessive use of qualifying speech marks here is entirely beyond our control).

Lipstick on an elephant
A lawsuit launched by Republican state legislators is designed to delay the Troopergate findings until after the election. The present brouhaha highlights the difficulties of holding people in public office to account when they know that leaving incriminating evidence on official channels could bring them down.

Admittedly, this didn’t stop Richard Nixon from recording his own dodgy dealings on the office tape recorder. But he was the exception that made the rule and had a few devious plans to back up his machinations such as getting his secretary to tape over the bad bits, and pretending not to understand the question.

Palin, who supports the teaching of creationism, and believes living in Alaska gives her a good grounding in foreign policy, will no doubt have ample opportunity to exercise her imagination even more in the coming months.

Deletionpedia: Makes Wikipedia Look Good

So you thought Wikipedia had no standards?
The internet, like space, is pretty much endless to the limited imagination of the humble human. The great random beast of subjective knowledge, Wikipedia, appears too to have an opinion on pretty much everything, even if, like the fickle humans it serves, it changes its opinions from time to time, or becomes an expert in some field in which it was once a mere amateurish hack. But you would be wrong to think this – much like the on-line encyclopaedia is often accused of being.

For there’s plenty of reasons and examples for material not making the site.

Rise of the eternal archivers
In his article for ars technica Nate Anderson says: ‘Plenty of user-generated content simply isn’t very good, or doesn't fall within established parameters, or violates copyright, or does something that gets it yanked from the sites that host such material, but sites like Deletionpedia and Delutube have sprung up to archive the deletions.’

And Deletionpedia is a 60,000 strong archive of material not considered good enough for Wikipedia. In his article, Anderson gives examples of some of the subjects nearly deleted from the world’s data banks. Weapons of the Imperium, for instance, a vast listing of the arsenal available to inhabitants of a computer game, was taken down from Wikipedia after a mere two and a half years.

It was resurrected by the faithful for Deletionpedia as was a list of bounty hunters from Star Wars. In the last week, Deletionpedia was itself close to being axed, in an twist that was almost lost to irony lovers forever.

Following the recent Wiki report on Vernon Kay being effectively ‘un-dead’, TechRadar news editor Patrick Goss warned of the folly of taking Wiki’s relatively uncollaborated word on anything without checking elsewhere too.

But then he would say that: he's still waiting for his profile to be posted up. Give it a week. And then check elsewhere.

Fusionman Flies Across Channel

‘If I get it wrong, I take a bath’
In a follow up to our story about Fusionman earlier in the week – Yves Rossy, the part Swiss, part eccentric ex airforce pilot – crossed the channel with nothing but the wing on his back. And those four jet engines placed a few scary centimetres from his soft, easy to burn flesh.
The flight, which was postphoned twice this week due to bad weather, was broadcast live on the National Geographic channel. Earlier in the week, Rossy was quoted as saying ‘If I calculate everything right, I will land in Dover. But if I get it wrong, I take a bath.’

The four engines powered him across the 22-mile stretch between Calais and Dover earlier this afternoon at speeds up to 125mph after being dropped out of a aeroplane 2,500m up over France. The eccentric, but fortunately, brilliant 49-year-old followed in the flying footsteps of Frenchman Louis Bleriot. Ninety-nine years ago, Bleriot was the first to make the trip in the relative luxury of an aeroplane, basic variety or not.

Eat his shorts, David Blane

It took Rossy just over 10 minutes, much as he had predicted, which was handy, as that's how long his fuel was due to last.

Rossy told the BBC that his flight felt ‘Great, really great. I only have one word, ‘thank you’, to all the people who did it with me.’ We like him so much we are going to count that as one word. And let's face it, I think even the backroom boys and girls would have let him take the credit for this one. Before landing by parachute, Rossy looped his rapt audience, always an impressive feat for a flying man with no way of steering beyond twisting his head and back a bit. Fusionman, we salute you.

All stories were written for TechRadar website.

Technlogy Blogs

Hollywood's New Dirty Dozen

Slagging off US foreign policy is a widely practised form of abuse from Basra to Bonn, and London to Lima, but surprisingly, it’s now being preached in the home of US propaganda: Hollywood. 

From the staged exploits of Errol Flynn and John Wayne in their west coast theatres of war, to Rambo and Chuck Norris SWAT-teaming foreign stereotypes like flies, Hollywood’s leading men and women have generally proudly flown the stars and stripes. But the emergence of a dozen or so movies criticizing current US policy suggests writers and directors feel the nation is ready to take a harder look at itself.

Among the anti-war  movies slated for this year are Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford and featuring Tom Cruise and Meryl Street; Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon; and The Valley of Elah, based on a true story about a soldier with PTSD, drawing on the talents of Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon. All question US involvement in various present conflicts.

A burgeoning anti-war climate is making these story lines more palatable. The influence of 24-hour news in bringing these horrors ‘live’ to our homes may be another contributory factor as is the increasing tendency of modern filmmakers to bypass the Pentagon for ‘help’ with military hardware and the unofficial script approval that may influence such co-operation.  

US paranoia over the enemy within is rarely based on hard fact. Despite the ranting of ‘Mad Dog’ McCarthy, communism wasn’t rampant in 1950’s America and the high-profile actor-activists lampooned in Team America have rarely spearheaded movements that have successfully mollified aggressive foreign policy. And while most Vietnam movies portray war as hell, those who suffer on screen are invariably the innocent grunts of the US. The hordes of cannon fodder represented by the forces of the invaded are invariably filled by faceless extras rather than the craggy familiar faces of the leads.

Perhaps this new genre represents an honest maturity in many Americans to re-evalute their nation’s role in shaping world events. Placing ourselves in others shoes is a major step towards understanding the other and as lack of empathy is a prime characteristic of a psychopath, it might not be such a bad thing.  

Get Stauffenberged!

Germany has declared war on Tom Cruise’s ambitions to star as the man who tried to blow up Hitler in the film Valkyrie. Defence minister Franz-Josef Jung has turned down a request to use the Berlin courtyard where Count Claus von Stauffenberg was shot after the bomb he planted failed to kill the Nazi leader.

Behind it is the German government’s refusal to recognize Scientology as a legitimate religion. A taskforce, which has been investigating the group closely for more than a decade, claims it advances the cause of totalitarianism. Civil servants have been banned from belonging to the sect. 

The bad blood is likely to stem from the comments of the sect’s founder L Ron Hubbard some 30 years ago. The science-fiction writer criticized Germany in a lecture – a viewpoint partly attributed to his belief that he had fought the Germans… as a Roman soldier in another life.

The Scientologists built a Berlin HQ earlier this year to launch its own publicity counter offensive along with the bridgehead established by its office in London. Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects, is due to start filming on July 19, the day before the plot’s 63rd anniversary. He may need a creative location scout.

Welcome Flood Of Foreigners

No doubt the Albert Hall will soon resound to a chorus of Briton’s Never Will be Slaves as the Proms wind up to their nationalistic conclusion. And if you forget for a moment the Romans, Normans, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, the cheery flag wavers are almost right.

But maybe the island mentality towards invasion by outsiders is becoming more nuanced … because foreign films, like fine cheeses and wine, have been increasingly slipping beneath the radar of our popular culture. Without a BNP picket in sight, thousands, nay millions of Britons are queuing up to admire and enjoy the produce of Johnny Foreigner flooding our multiplexes.
In the 90’s, nine foreign language films broke the million pound mark. In this decade thus far, 23 subtitled movies have broken that barrier. This year’s offerings alone cover French, Chinese, German and the Esperanto of the Ancient Mayan world, Yucatec. Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto was responsible for the latter and followed on from the use of street Latin and Aramaic in The Passion of the Christ.

The most significant change is in the demographics. The English middle classes have always had a sneaking admiration for the French way of life. But alongside their delicate corn-fed posteriors are the wider slung butts of the lumpen proletariat, whose very ancestors gleefully waved two fingers at the French before delivering upon them another wooden arrow from their longbows. Saint George must be turning in his grave. If only we knew what country that swarthy Greek was buried in.       

Virus Of Video Nasties

In Russia, a student has been arrested for posting a video on the Internet purportedly showing two gagged migrants being savagely murdered beneath a Swastika.

It appeared on a right-wing website linked to Russia’s most popular networking site. A caption refers to the executed as foreigners, while a masked man beheads one victim, before shooting the other in the head and screaming ‘Glory to Russia!’ The video reflects the extreme end of a wave of violent nationalism in the country, which Amnesty International last year described as ‘out of control’.

The content echoes the grisly video of the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl last year when covering the War on Terror. Snuff movies were known about 20 years ago but few people had actually seen one. The Internet’s all-seeing eye now brings them to every household.

Back in Britain, Panorama recently highlighted the trend for posting videos of schoolyard brawls on sites such as YouTube. Adverts placed alongside these fights from big name companies like Pepsi, eBay, Starbucks and Sony provoked further outrage.

Currently, video hosts rely on others to complain before removing violent material. Pornography rarely lasts long, but despite the comparative lack of consensual fun, violence tends to be seen more ambivalently.

Websites like the ironically named www.nothingtoxic.com blend scenes of extreme violence with ‘humour’ in a tone suggesting the two are natural partners. As I sit in an office with the sounds of adult colleagues gleefully butchering each other on the latest video game, I wonder whether we have passed the tipping point. 

Past Master

Gareth Mason’s lifelong ambition to step back in time was achieved with a little help from the happy owners of a 28-year-old HMV 2712A…

When Ethel Elvy bought her HMV Colourmaster in the early 70s her son and daughter-in-law drove from Croydon to Whitstable to catch a glimpse of the brave new world of colour. Grand-daughter Nicola is now the proud owner of one of the first wave of mass-produced colour TVs in this country. And like her relatives, Nicola sees no good reason to replace it.

Her mother Petra and father, communications expert Peter, once bought a video player which didn’t record. When Peter was on telly – they simply got their cameras out and took photographs of him. And they still have an undimmed affection for a TV which just refuses to lay down and die. With this being our anniversary issue, we thought we’d take a sidelong look at how a past master has stood the test of time.

The 2712A is distinguished by its bulging screen and expanse of blond hardwood veneer on a chipboard frame – covering space on which a modern TV would be stretching its screen. Despite its bulk, its17in picture would now barely register as average. From the bottom, front fascia controls are found for brightness, colour and volume, above which are four clunky channel buttons. A Reset button is found rearwards, like today’s personal preference settings, but random in its workings. A kind of Russian roulette with an electron gun instead of a six-shooter.

Close by, you’ll find the Contrast button (too risqué for the front panel?) and an aerial socket. While light by today’s standards, it’s densely packed and had enough sharp edges to flatten my index finger to the thickness of a postage stamp as I lowered it onto its stand. The 8000 Series chassis used by this and many other models from old hands such as Ferguson, Ultra and Marconi was designed to bring colour TV to the masses. This required a TV selling beneath the magic £200 mark. While still a princely sum – it massively undercut the £350 average for CTV – moving colour closer from its luxury status to the commodity product it is today.

It conformed to the same PAL 625-line 50Hz standard and the Delta gun picture tubes are still used on modern monitors. Its performance was inevitably compromised compared with its more expensive siblings – notably by colour fringing at the picture edges. Otherwise the innards are differentiated by the many capacitors, resistors and transistors used to decode the colour signal which would now be replaced by a single chip. Their complex configuration also makes this TV more prone to problems caused by one or more discrete elements being knocked out of alignment.

For operation: check electricity bill paid, slot plug into wall socket, click On switch. Tuning requires each channel button to be twisted until desired channel is found. Fans of satellite or cable may find themselves channel-hopping less than usual. General knob operation follows the traditional side-to-side method except for channel changing. This requires a decisive forward thrust accompanied by what sounds like a high calibre rifle shot. An early example of today’s child lock, it alerts anyone within a 50m radius that you’ve changed sides while they are out of the room. It also proves that user-friendly products have been around a lot longer than we think. Why simplify complex features such as remote controls and onscreen menus? Just don’t have them.

Picture performance bears as much resemblance to the modern TV as its looks. In other words, not much. While the basic technology remains the same – considerable age and the absence of the refinements brought in over the last three decades leave it predictably wanting. That said, while the overall picture would challenge few, if any, from this era – it still scores some positive points. People and straight lines are sharply outlined with little visible dot crawl. Fine detail was ok... not that fine... but it was detail nonetheless and stronger than on some modern budget models.

While the picture was stable – a general fuzziness spread over the screen in small patches. Despite this, the whole picture remained stable and flicker-free. Depth of field is somewhat limited in that you can’t see anything in detail that’s not in the foreground. Another interesting characteristic was the ‘sandstorm effect’ in which a barely visible wave of motion swept from left to right across the screen. Changing over from Beau Geste, this became respectively, the ‘windswept’, ‘mustard-gas’ and ‘sea-spray’ effect as I changed channels. With a nod to old-fashioned service values – no premium was charged for this unique selling point.

The main problem was with the colour – hardly surprising with all that wear on those ancient tubes. Overall, it resembled a real scene viewed through a gossamer green veil or a novel shade of yellowy-green – or chartreuse to the brandy-lovers among you. If you prefer to see red – it’s your choice. Simply twist the colour button the other direction. For lovers of blue movies, this TV is not for you! Despite this, Channel 5 was picked up as well as the other terrestrial channels. Although, one press of the Reset button magicked back some of those elusive azure hues – its short of an ideal balance.

Audio performance is closer to today’s norm. It may be unfair to discuss such luxurious elements as bass, midrange and treble, but it covers the range as well as many modern mono sets. Turned up to its rasping full wick and there’s a predictably painful distortion but otherwise little to offend the ear. Programme makers are well-aware that people can abide dodgy pictures longer than poor sound. That’s what keeps one of the 2712A’s ancient legs in the market despite the other three firmly entrenched in the antique world.

It may be unfair to test a TV with a dodgy colour tube but we’d need a time machine to get around that problem. I’d also have developed a considerably flatter physique if I’d tried to carry this one over the threshold following its launch. And in a time when so many products seem to reliably expire with their guarantees, it’s commendable to find a product which refuses to submit to the ravages of time. We’ll gloss over the technical performance in favour of its magnificent staying power.

Nicola, the third generation of owner, sees no reason to put her green-hued companion out to pasture. ‘I just have to accept some people think I’m odd.’

What Video & TV 2000

Film Reviews

 

All The President's Men

This film doesn’t need to be stuck on a DVD to be enjoyed – its substance would shine through on the lowliest VHS tape. The classic tale of Nixon’s fall from presidential grace takes place within the twin worlds of political intrigue and investigative journalism.

Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the callow newspaper men who follow a trail of corruption and cover-ups of labyrinthine complexity, which pits one newspaper against the world’s most powerful government.

The paranoid, dimly-lit ambience is lent poignancy by the fact that it is all true. This is just as well as its age limits the picture and sound quality.

While it’s a decent enough transfer, there’s no upgrading the mono soundtrack, so the other 4.1 channels will be frustrated through all those tense whispered phone calls and clandestine late night rendezvous.

Nonetheless, the heart of this story is in the dark dialogue so the stark realism might prove compromised with a 90’s soundtrack and effects.

It’s a fascinating historic insight and features a fine display of acting by the fresh-faced leads and their grizzled employers. There’s something Kafkaesque about the Washington Post’s lone fight against a sinister and shadowy ruling party whose power and reach knows no bounds. Except, of course, the good guys win.

It educates us on two fronts: how to get a story on the front page and how not to run a country. Together, it’s irresistible.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Horror aficionados will know Hellraiser and its sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II came from the pen of horror master Clive Barker. It may also explain the cut-and-paste feel to much of the characterisation and plot. The ten violent seconds of the Part 1 summary did little to answer questions like: ‘Mummy, why are people skinned, trussed up with cheese wire and peppered with six-inch nails when they go to Hell?’ ‘Because they are, dear.’

No burning pools of sulphur here, no withering intestines, rusty tridents and eternity spent watching Telly Addicts.

The first Hellraiser was based on the Clive Barker book – he also wrote the screenplay. This time, Peter Atkins was commissioned for some more of the same, with no shirking on the body parts and easy on the cerebral stuff.

While inferior to the original, it still generates a genuinely fearful and barren landscape, though one which rarely had me on the edge of my seat.

The main roles are played competently enough by Ashley ‘somebody slaughtered my family like goats’ Laurence, Clare Higgins is a nastier step-mother than most, and the pin-head wanabee Kenneth Cranham is evil Dr Channard.

It’s also a little schizophrenic as a DVD. Picture performance is fairly good, without showing the format at its sparkling best. There are no major problems and the dim ambience of hell’s corridors relies more on shades of grey than fiery yellows. Still, there’s enough detail to turn your stomach, so don’t worry about that.

Audio is tremendously disappointing, with only English Dolby Surround on offer despite the usual Dolby Digital logo stamped on the back. Flesh-slashing chains, skin being sucked off like a body suit, nails hammered into skulls – all these heart-warming sounds are denied the full treatment – shame really, as it’s needed a lot more than on many films which do offer the full 5.1 digital channels.

Extras were rather more thoughtful – the backdrop to the menu screen sets the tone with a freshly ripped heart feebly beating away. Worth a look if you liked the first one – a little disorientating otherwise.

Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels

There’s a voyeuristic pleasure in watching gangster movies. We know we would never behave that badly ourselves or appear that sophisticated let alone do both at the same time. And compared to your stateside hoodlum, the great British mobster is always going to seem like an under-achiever, so a little black humour usually helps balance the psychopathic scales.

That’s what you get here – a film that does London in the same way Trainspotting did Edinburgh, with an eclectic cast including Sting, footballer-thug Vinnie Jones, the former world bare-knuckle boxing champion, and a crowd of half-familiar young actors playing an assortment of geezers, toffs, wideboys and black dudes.

The standard of acting is patchy in the case of some of the professional crims, but overall the largish cast puts in a credible performance, once you’ve accepted nobody is going to say anything in regular English which can’t be said in rhyming slang.

There are far too many twists and turns in this picaresque tale to explain here, and while the humour is black rather than ha-ha, it’s both engaging and entertaining as well as unpredictable.
While such films rarely draw on the full capabilities of the format, both video and audio are impressive. The subdued and shadowy backdrop is well rendered, as are the tense, wrinkled faces of the various geezers.

The Dolby Digital soundtrack is excellent – partly due to the film’s quirky music and partly because of all those noises peculiar to Mafioso: gunshots, clinking glasses, fingers breaking, car doors slamming on heads etc.

It’s available in both wide and full-screen versions and comes with interviews with cast and crew – which are brief and less than inspirational. Stick your daisies on your plates and get down to Blockbusters.

The Quick And the Dead

‘Think you’re quick enough?’ is the tag for this shoot ‘em up Western. And if your IQ is in double figures you’ll be quick enough. And this despite the pulling power of Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman and one Leonardo DiCaprio.

Our Sharon’s allegedly high IQ is clearly applied to her contracts rather than scripts while the corpse of Gene Hackman’s character in Unforgiven seems to have crawled out of its pool of blood onto an adjacent film set.

What he finds is truly frightening. A plot so predictable there must be a catch (there isn’t) and a child-like DiCaprio who’s not only his son, but thinks he’s a gunslinger and in with a chance of getting off with Sharon Stone.

With that baby face he won’t make king of his own backyard let alone the world. This grippingly unrealistic tale follows a gunslingers’ tournament hosted by the corrupt town honcho Hackman and a regular circus of cool-hand Lukes, Dicks and Harrys.

Shazza herself is no mean shot (an’ she sure is purty) and is out to avenge the death of her spouse at the hands of…oh you’ll never guess.

Anyway, the plot then twists and turns as much as a Roman road and a lot of gunfights later the story unravels into exactly what we thought would happen two hours earlier. Then again, I’ve read good reviews about this – there really is no accounting for taste. Picture performance showed no unexpected flaws and its Dolby Digital audio was well suited to the whistling bullets, clinking glasses and tumbleweed-rolling ambience.

Das Boot

Great films are often as enjoyable to watch played through a battered top-loader as they are on a high-tech source like DVD. Conversely, some truly appalling dollops of filmic tripe use the format to impressive effect for that two minutes necessary to amaze your friends.

Every now and then a disc comes along that accentuates both the positives, and Das Boot is one of them. This director’s cut from Wolfgang Petersen (Air Force One, In The Line Of Fire) adds a full hour of footage and a new soundtrack from the 1985 version, taking it to a mammoth three hours 15 minutes, divided up into 66 chapters.

It follows the crew of U-96, one of Nazi Germany’s deadly U-Boats, across the North Atlantic in search of British ships to prey on.

The length of the film is justified by the juxtaposition of long periods of inactivity and tension with unpredictable bouts of action, where the fate of the crew and their enemy hangs in the most delicate of balances.

As an anti-war film, it works for non-German viewers in highlighting the normality and suffering of ‘their boys’ and for exposing the German subs as the death tubs they undoubtedly were, with allied depth charges whizzing past their terrified ears.

Although much of the action takes place 180 metres below sea level – with no lurid sunsets to really stretch it – the picture quality was excellent. But it is the soundtrack that is most memorable.

From the eerie near-silence of the depths in which the crews’ breath is masked only by the ominous creaking of the boat’s hulls threatening to implode, to the muffled thud of underwater explosions and screaming of fighter planes tearing overhead, this is what Dolby Digital was made for. Film purists will no doubt favour the original German language soundtrack but the English one is generally dubbed to a high standard. Further extras include a a director’s commentary, featurette and trailer – all worth watching to remind yourself that this was filmed in a studio and not at the bottom of the ocean.

If you want to see a superbly made film accurately portraying the horrors of war this is for you. If you’re looking to overcome your fear of deep water and claustrophobia – go to a shrink.

The Client

John Grisham specialises in made-for-movie books. With this nicely-paced thriller, The Client, the transition from page to screen is once again smoothly made.

Directed by Joel Schumacher, of Batman and Lost Boys fame, the movie deals with familiar Grisham themes: mobsters, lawyers and moral dilemmas.

With the reassuringly professional Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in the credits it must be worth a second glance. Our Tommy plays the local district attorney out to nail a gangster for murder. The witness is a frightened (and threatened) kid played by Brad Renfro. Jones reprises his trademark role of ‘good guy lawman not quite on your side’ a la Fugitive.

While somewhat more mature than my own friends passing out of law school, Sarandon retains her status as a thinking man’s crumpet. She plays the callow but feisty attorney who protects the boy from the myriad dangers that beset him. And all for the solitary single dollar offered by her rough-edged but big-hearted child client. No departure from reality there then.

The two grizzled (but well-preserved) thesps are backed up capably by young Renfro who, thankfully, has enough of the trailer trash in him to extinguish any Caulkinesque traits. Anyway, the resolution arrives after a few bursts of action, several significant looks, various points of order and the occasional childish tantrum.

By the end, everyone understands each other a little better and there’s a few group hugs – entirely reminiscent of our own office environment. One for a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Funny Bones

Funny Bones begins with an American comedian’s act bombing in Vegas. This causes him to flee to the English seaside town of his childhood for new material to relaunch his flagging career. And with a strong comic cast including Jerry Lewis, Richard Griffiths, Oliver Platt and Oliver Reed in a film set between the twin towers of cheesy entertainment, Blackpool and Las Vegas, you might expect to be in for a barrel of laughs.

But as the dialogue splutters along, with lines that are never quite as savagely funny or thought-provoking as the film thinks, you are left empathising less with the performers and more as a short-changed comedy club customer. The exception to this is rising star Lee Evans who steals the show in the idiot-savant persona of Jack Parker.

Director Peter Chelsom mines the rich seam of eccentricity and postcard humour of the English seaside. The landscape is peopled by an assortment of strange characters including taciturn uncles, clever dogs and fat ladies in swimwear.

Unfortunately, it dips its toe into the comedic waters when you’d rather it took the full plunge. As the darker sides and frustrations of the characters’ pasts emerge it becomes more a film about comedians than a sidesplitting comedy. The collective parts of this film make a good yarn but somehow the whole lacks sufficient punch to make it truly memorable.

Evans has enough quirky moments to set himself up as a latter-day Norman Wisdom with a twist but you can’t help feeling he could have had a few more routines squeezed out of him. The film’s mixture of humour and pathos results in a rather diluted end-product inducing amnesia where laughter and tears were intended.

The Usual Suspects

If you missed this first-time round at the cinema, you’ve got some much needed catching up to do with director Brian Singer’s dazzling debut thriller, penned by Christopher McQuarrie.

The breath-taking pace is quickly established in an opening scene, which takes us to the burning wreck of a body-strewn cargo ship near Los Angeles. The next 100 minutes follow the frustrated efforts of FBI agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) to gain some idea of the cause and perpetrators of this destruction with only two survivors to help him with his enquiries. One of these is mummified in hospital, the other being Kevin Spacey’s Oscar winning Verbal Kint. Through him the story winds back to the meeting of the eponymous suspects played impressively by Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Bryne, Kevin Pollak and Benicio Toro, the last of whom offers some comic relief with one of the more entertaining voices in movies.

The plot stays one manic step ahead of the audience throughout. Flashbacks cleverly rewrite the past in the words of whoever’s being quizzed. This means that you have to wait for the end credits before you have any certain idea of what really happened. Singer eschews Tarantino-like realism in the violence perpetrated upon much of the cast, preferring instead to use his cinematic prowess to create the mood of tension and a sense of foreboding.

The intrigue is heightened by the shadowy and semi-mythical figure of Keyser Soze, a criminal bogeyman from Hungary integral to the many false trails designed to keep you on the edge of your seat. Expected to be confused and entertained.

As Good As It Gets

Seven Oscar nominations with Best Actor and Actress nominations won by Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt suggest this is one to look out for. Ultimately, these accolades show how thin a crop of films made the Academy that year – what with a sinking bathtub picking up most of the prizes.

It is good and if you’re a fan of growling Jack, it’s one of the best examples of sustained scattershot vitriol you’re likely to find in his manifestation as writer and obsessive Melvin Udall. His scrooge-like epiphany is down to his interplay with feisty long-suffering waitress Carol (Helen Hunt) and his gay neighbour (Greg Kinnear), whose dog he befriends when its owner is hospitalised. Cuba Gooding Junior injects his customary enthusiasm into his role as an art dealer who mediates between Melvin and Simon.

At times, Nicholson’s cussing is more vicious than witty but his social surliness at least guarantees the slush factor is kept under control – this is a romantic comedy remember.

If you’re a fan of the above it’s well worth a look while the neutrals may be left wondering how the wrinkled old boy with the maniacal smile can still be getting romantic leads. The excellent picture quality exposes those physical attributes mercilessly.

My Best Friend’s Wedding

Helmed by Muriel’s Wedding director PJ Hogan, this romantic comedy apparently went down a storm in the States, hitting that Four Weddings feel-good chord. Julia Roberts plays Julianne, who realises she’s in love with her best mate around the time he’s announcing his marriage to Cameron Diaz.

Out with the old, in with the new, you might think. But man-in-the-middle Dermot Mulroney hesitates, despite the lily-white perfection of his betrothed, who contrasts starkly with the selfish machinations of his wide-mouthed pal.

Rupert Everett, who plays the handsome English charmer with relish, completes the cast list. But there’s a twist. Oh my gosh, he’s a homosexual, and what’s worse, seems to be quite happy about it. But such outrageous casting is balanced by Mulroney’s presence as a square-jawed regular guy, so the men’s men have someone to identify with too.

When he appears, it’s Everett who steals the show, but he’s a strangely peripheral figure for most the film.

Ultimately, it’s enjoyable enough, but you can’t help feeling there was a great script out there and someone decided it would be much better watered down to this. They were wrong.

George Of The Jungle

This enjoyable Walt Disney romp is a cross between The Jungle Book and Crocodile Dundee but is unlikely to repeat their box office success. It’s also a take on Tarzan, with beast-master George – played by Hollywood himbo Brendan Fraser – brought up by apes and lured to San Francisco by the requisite beautiful woman. From here, swinger George is reeled back in by the call of the wild where the rather loose and vague plot finally unravels.

There’s something very off-the-cuff about this film, as if it was done for a laugh in Disney’s Christmas break between more pretentious and expensive projects. The result is a far more likeable and heart-warming than many Disney offerings, even if totally unchallenging.
The gimmicks which bring about a smile to your face include George’s inability to swing properly, bongo-playing apes, his English-speaking ape mentor (voiced by John Cleese) and perhaps best, the elephant who thinks it’s a dog.

There’s something rather old-fashioned about the effects created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop – more muppet than Jumanji extras but they seem appropriate for the overall fare. Extras are kept to a bare minimum, though the Dolby Digital soundstrack benefits from the jungle scenes, both concrete and verdurous. One for the kids, but you may find the odd wry smile creeping over your face.

The Big Lebowski

The award-winning Coen Brothers are known to divide the film-going fraternity with their quirky slant on movie-making and The Big Lebowski may polarise these two camps yet further.

It follows the meandering progress of Jeff Lebowski, aka the Dude, who’s seeking compensation for his soiled carpet – the result of a misdirected squeeze on his rich namesake. Though he’d rather be bowling and getting stoned, the Dude reluctantly gets dragged into a far messier affair with kidnapping, large sums of money, and exotic thugs at large. He’s supported by stereotypical ‘Nam vet (John Goodman), whose wholehearted and ill-judged commitment complicates matters further.

Also present are sterling performers such as Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi and John Turturro, all of whom offer a slice of Coenesque characterisation.

A Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is offered in both English and French and has some opportunity to shine among the crashing bowling balls and screeching cars, while picture performance is as crisp and full-blooded as we’ve come to expect from this format. Nevertheless, this is clearly one for film rather than effects fans.

Coen brother enthusiasts will enjoy the haphazard plot for going off at more wacky tangents than ever before, and creating a fuller spectrum of wild characters. While these idiosyncrasies will woo the diehards, the rest may wonder why they can’t attend to the basics. This film may be flecked by their genius like paint spotted on a blank canvas, but without the craft it’s hard to call it a masterpiece.

Anaconda

Is this the great snake movie the world’s been waiting on for so long? Well, no, we’ll be waiting a little longer for that. But, while unjust to say it was in any sense good, it wasn’t the unadulterated pap I’d expected.

The man versus man-eating beast relationship is one that appeals to the psychology of modern folk, bored with complete control over their environment. But where Jaws succeeded, most others have failed – including Jaws 2. And let’s face it, unless behemoths and sabre-toothed tigers spring incarnate from their fossils, it’s unlikely they’ll find anything scarier than the big rubber fish.

Like the current spate of monster movies, Anaconda has a big advantage over its ancestors, No, it’s not the plot silly, it’s the special effects. Before computers (BC) it would have been frightening how this particular beast would have looked on screen. It would probably involve an earthworm, some spraypaint, and a small dose of LSD.

Here, you’re left worrying whether these huge serpents really do move with such terrifying speed, and surely they can’t eat a man whole? Well, it seems they can, and excellent graphics and DVD quality do wonders for the wriggling reptile and the lush, verdant Amazonian backdrop.

The stars are of higher profile than the overall fare, though Oscar nominations may be on the back burner. An eclectic bunch includes a grizzled and shifty snake-hunter played by Jon Voigt and ex-NWA rapper Ice Cube with less attitude than usual. Jennifer Lopez plays the beautiful and brilliant scientist role while Eric Stolz is the leader of the expedition – an undemanding part played mainly from his sick bed.

The Dolby Digital soundtrack deals admirably with the screeching jungle sounds and all those serpentine rustlings, drips and hisses that leap out at you. Not since Eden has a snake exuded such menace, though more for what goes into his mouth than what comes out of it.

Contact

Compared to the classic man-meets-Martian epics, Contact disappoints. Good acting, a credible premise and the promise of fantastic revelations. But ultimately it’s unfulfilling. Satisfying the audience’s expectations of what lives at the end of the great unknown is a tricky task. Most fail because the unveiled creatures, in true Scooby Doo fashion, tend to be damp squibs compared to the fireworks we’d expected.

In this sense, Contact cops out by keeping you in your armchair for two hours 24 minutes and then denying you a fitting climax. The alien encounter itself is fleeting and relatively unilluminating, more of an epiphany for the heroine than a revelation for mankind and the audience.

The plot follows astronomer Ellie Arroway’s quest for alien interaction, something the life-long stargazer hopes to achieve with a pair of headphones and a large Sky dish. The lead is played by the always talented and usually tormented Jodie Foster who doesn’t let us down in either respect.

The film’s tribulations concern the premature death of her parents, which adds poignancy to the flashback of her devoted Pa giving her that magical first telescope.  Remember yours? Such pathos obviously vindicates her obsessive hobby-cum-career. But I was in full sympathy with her grant-with-holding supremo (played by Tom Skerrit) who reasonably suggests she could be doing something more useful. Some people ascribe spiritual properties to gemstones, but I wouldn’t recommend massive government funding to help them develop their theories.

Contact’s second leitmotif is the unlikely marriage of science and faith. Ellie’s antithesis is embodied by the slick writer/prophet Palmer Ross (played by Matthew McConaughey) who espouses his own faith rather than that professed by any established religion.

The predictably snarling James Wood as a White House hardman completes a goodish cast along with a strikingly implausible John Hurt. Hurt plays an amoral mad bald millionaire scientist who is an occasional ally to the starry-eyed Ellie.

After 350 words of condemnation, it may seem incongruous to say it’s a fairly enjoyable romp and a decent Dolby Digital soundtrack complements the space shots – especially the one in which Ellie is literally shot into space in a device modelled on an alien bath-tub.

Being a special edition, this flipside disk is packed with feature-length commentaries and special effects constructions – thus sating the most anal of viewers. But by this time, I was on my balcony retransmitting digital TV signals to Alpha Centauri.

Cutting Edge

Having dipped his toes in the shallow waters of iMovie, editing novice Gareth Mason dives into murkier depths and wonders if he can stay afloat…

Apple Macs have a reputation for user-friendly interfaces which let creatives get on with the clever stuff without worrying their illogical heads over more tedious PC affairs. Having recently bought a £1,200 iMac with a deficient CD burner and an internet connection which needed umpteen visits from a Mac expert to get it working – my Mac-mania is now compromised. But one feature which didn’t cause me any grief was iMovie – instrumental in my decision to upgrade from the minuscule capacity of my eight-year-old Power Mac to the graphite Billy Whizz sleekness of its more muscular graphite descendent.

Fortunately, iMovie’s hype did not follow the company’s ‘three simple steps’ sales pitch for, say, building an internet home page. With this, Step 1 seems to involve going off for a year and learning HTML before moving to the next ‘simple’ step. With iMovie, you really can just get on with it. This means cutting and pasting my less-than-pro quality footage into a crudely effective home movie with enough effects, transitions and titles to brush it up and half-impress your (non-technical) friends.

Mastering iMovie takes little time because its features are limited and, to its credit, it is intuitive in that good ol’ Mac way. As such, it doesn’t take long before you want to use features such as control of clip audio levels and more complex ones without which your movies will forever be marooned in amateurville. The relevance of making this monumental step up to Final Cut Pro (FCP) is based on choice. Or lack of it. In Macland, the borders are distinct so there are no convenient stepping stones to bridge this gulf. So how did I cope in the deep end?

Requirements

To get Final Cut Pro 2 running, the following system requirements are advised: a Mac with 300MHz or faster processor coupled with a MAC 9.1 operating system (not Mac OS X), QuickTime 5.0, 192Mb of RAM (256Mb for real-time processing), 20Mb of disk space for installation and one or more SCSI drives. Don’t worry about QuickTime as 5.0 is supplied and easily installed with the package. My iMac is of the ‘fastest’ G3 variety. It’s equipped with a 600MHz processor, 256Mb of RAM (double the spec but currently cheap as chips) and plenty of space left over from my voluminous 40GB of hard disk memory.

I settled for this model rather than the 500MHz model below it on the basis that I might later regret not doubling up the hard disk capacity. Regardless of the need to massively upgrade your RAM from the clearly inadequate 64MB common to the 500MHz model – anyone with experience of video editing will tell you how quickly 20GB of hard disk can disappear as your footage mounts up. With five minutes of digital video taking up around 1GB of space I’d filled up 15GB in no time. This said, my system carries out all the operations in both iMovie and FCP with ease, which when you’ve investigated the myriad possibilities of FCP, seems to make it worth stepping up to the top G3. This is a relief as FCP is sold as optimised for the current generation G4 engine and as an enthusiastic amateur I’d already reached my budget limit.

Installation

Opening the box, you’ll find CDs for installation, Peak DV audio editing software, Cleaner 5EX for streaming video for the internet and a tutorial CD. The manual is scarily bulky at 1,435 pages and accompanied by a more svelte tutorial book, which is replicated onscreen. Faced with this mass of material, I decided to work my way through the 108 pages of tutorials after spending some quality time with the main manual getting a feel for the system’s capabilities. While skim-reading the manual allows only the shallowest dip into a very deep pool of knowledge, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was able to pick up.

Clearly the right people have been put to work as it answered many of those questions you were afraid to ask. Not only that, it explained simply and clearly more general concepts such as the difference between on- and off-line editing, the significance of timecodes and definitions of say, techy audio terms like ‘dynamic range’, ‘signal-to-noise’ and ‘overdriven audio’. This successfully treads the fine line between informing clearly and comprehensively, and patronising the reader. As a reference tool to the budding editor, it will prove invaluable, particularly as it includes a wealth of hard, and rarely superfluous, data. In short, it explains the ‘whys’ as well as the ‘hows’.

The tutorials were a natural extension of this knowledge, without which, I’d have been lost. Working my way through these over a couple of days was invaluable. To progress further, I’ll probably need to do it again, but with the basics covered, the next time will be considerably faster. Whether the system is intuitive is a moot point – there’s simply so much, you need someone (or a 1,400-page book) to hold your hand. Installation was a breeze taking barely ten minutes despite my installing QuickTime 5 as well as FCP. Registration, memory allocation and initial set-up were all made without hitch.

In fact, at no point did the software offer any problems. Around now, I was offered several choices for resolution and quality of captured footage. While DV’s transfer rate is fixed at 3.6Mbyte per second – the options refer to FCP’s ability to also capture analogue footage with the right card installed.

Down to work

Once done, we launched into the tutorials, broadly divided into Acquiring media, Basic editing, Compositing and Effects, Audio Editing and Distributing Media. Already this distinguishes itself from rivals such as Adobe which produces two programs, Premier (for editing) and After Effects, from the one-stop solution offered here.

The main interface uses two monitor screens. The left hand one is the Viewer and dragging clips from this to the Canvas brings up options such as Insert, Overwrite and Superimpose. Clips can also be simply dropped on the timeline for basic assemble editing, below this is the inevitable Timeline, and a Browser in which you can access filters, transitions and effects. Talking of which, transitions and effects can be performed in real-time with the appropriate processing card.

It’s only when you start delving into some of these browser folders that you realise how much is available. In the browser, and elsewhere, these folders are found within tabs while yet more is revealed under the standard drag and drop menus. To be fair, there’s a lot of crossover between this overwhelming mass of functions, just as there are modes of operation ie between keyboard shortcuts (the likely choice once you’re familiar with the program) and the onscreen controls. The only memory problems were with my own and when I was occasionally stumped by an instruction in the tutorials – I was often rescued by the description shown when placing the cursor above the control.

In the Compositing and Effects section, adding shadows, opacity and motion paths ratcheted up the technology in inverse proportion to my ability to keep up. Not difficult, just too much information for someone whose grounding is in iMovie. Titling and transitions didn’t seem much more complex than what I was used to though, perhaps, these functions are more likely to attract a gimmicky depth of choice in more basic programs. This may be the opportunity to do my fine-tuning in Photoshop now that I have a computer capable of working efficiently in it. But I think that’s probably enough learning for now.

Financially, Apple Mac’s can’t compete byte for byte with their PC rivals. The reasons for favouring it are more to do with your profession (publishing, graphic design etc) and other less tangible reasons such as culture, habit, and design and operational philosophy. So, your purchase of FCP is inextricably bound up with your reasons for having a Mac. The combined price of both would be, in my case, the best part of £2,000. Any PC fan will be delighted to point out that the more competitive PC market will offer you much better deals in terms of both hardware and a huge variety of software packages catering for all levels and budgets. But FCP is aimed squarely at the converted. And it offers great value when compared with much of the opposition bringing professional quality software significantly closer to the masses. An impressive, if daunting, package and one likely to keep me gamely occupied for some time.

What Camcorder magazine 2002

Capturing The World

Gareth Mason finds a good way to make money from his holiday snaps...

Once we only had memories to bring home from our hols. But now, thanks to video technology our annual investment can stretch well beyond the ‘real-time’ fortnight away. Friends, relatives and mere acquaintances can see the wonders of the world through your eyes without the associated dose of dysentery. Who knows, if it’s good enough you could recoup some of that hard-spent cash by charging them for the experience. OK, maybe you’re just going to sit in a dark room alone watching endless reruns of the same footage. Either way, you’ll be glad for a little planning when shooting places you may never visit again.

Obviously, the quality of your footage is limited by the kit you use but before you blame the tools consider how well you know and use all the features on your camcorder. Stepping up the price ladder is the easy option for better videos – if you can afford it – but practice and experiment will ultimately make for more satisfying and better videos.

Even some of the gimmicky options such as Automatic Exposure (AE) modes and digital effects can add that startling effect that makes the shot. It’ll be worth it even if used only once. So, familiarise yourself with your kit and mentally see if you can marry various functions with the places you visit and shots you’re likely to be taking. Before you go, make sure you have everything you’ll need to suit the ambient conditions. Will you be travelling light? Make sure you have a bag suitable for the climate as well as your video needs.

Talking of climate, when moving from a cold to warm location give the camcorder time to reach a stable temperature before shooting. Keep it warm when cold and generally avoid extreme temperatures – below 40 degrees and 95 degrees Faranheit. Moisture from humidity, rain and particularly salt-water can all messily crash and ruin the perfect footage party as can sand, dust, suntan lotion and insect repellents. Thankfully, camcorder miniaturisation means you can pack in more handy accessories than before, as well as making filming easier and less obtrusive.

While you should have more than enough stock of tape and batteries – remember, these run down more quickly in the cold – don’t clutter it up with things you’re unlikely to need or which can be replaced naturally. A smaller tripod or even some stable natural object will make a lot of room without a cumbersome large one. Perhaps, now you can carry that rain shield for that spectacular waterfall shot or marine housing for the underwater paradise you can’t trust to memory.

A final warning on preparation. Camcorders can easily be spirited away by the light fingered. Take precautions, particularly if you’re roughing it, which also means having insurance or perhaps an alarm for all you Inspector Gadgets. Separating your finished tapes from your camcorder is not a bad idea – it’s easier to put a price on an insured camcorder than New Year’s Eve in Rio or your partner dancing to Saturday Night Fever at a disco in the Gobi Desert. Bring proof-of-purchase documents to avoid customs hassles and don’t buy abroad without a little research: with import duties and VAT it may not be such a bargain notwithstanding potential problems with guarantees and incompatibility.

The world is your studio so try and adapt it to your needs. If you can’t recharge batteries easily then save power whenever possible, using a power save feature, for example. Also make the best of ambient conditions such as natural light. Engaging night mode or manually opening the iris to let in more light might both work, but in different ways. A once in a lifetime shot is worth trying in several ways to get right as well as being a useful learning aid when you compare them. It’s also worth trying to capture the unusual – getting away from the standard postcard shot. Not many people know the pyramids at Giza are found on the edge of a sprawling Cairo suburb. You’re not working for the tourist board so get the shot nobody sees. The contrast between old and new is more honest and has more artistic merit.

A little location research is invaluable. If you have the chance to look around first, you can save yourself time and tape. If you know there’s a better shot of a snow-capped mountains just around the corner, a more beautiful church, a livelier time of day, you can save separating the wheat from the chaff later and have more time and tape to concentrate on the best parts. Local customs and events will bring flavour and personality to your videos which will stand out over more anonymous street scenes which don’t have a ‘hook’ to distinguish it, let alone reference to where it is. Always ask yourself: ‘Would my friends be jealous?’ If not, turn off the camcorder and keep looking.

Time of day is also important. Sunrise and sunset are often the most spectacular. This also avoids the problems of shooting in a bright midday sun. It’s also worth taking shots of one place at different times, not just for the contrast in light and colours but for the way it tells a story. By creating a beginning, middle and end to an event, say a weekly market, a complete picture can be presented to the viewer. It’s easy to forget how unusual new people and places are when you have become used to them. Try and look at things from the perspective of someone who’s spent their entire life on the Outer Hebrides. If six camels and a dog represents rush hour in the High Atlas then that’s your shot. What may seem mundane today will appear colourful and exotic back in Blighty.

With camcorder technology, sound quality has always played poorer cousin to that glamourous upstart, video. But the gap is closing and whether you have high quality digital audio from a DV cam or an external microphone you can add a lot of value with a complementary soundtrack. You may not be able to touch, taste or smell the jungle scene but if you can hear as well as see it your ability to bring the scene to life is doubled. You may be best making a separate recording and dubbing it on later.

It’s a good idea to look out for cutaways and establishing shots to signpost different sections of your video. These need only be brief; there’s only so long you can expect your friends to be interested in looking at video of a static road sign, beach or side of a mountain. The reason you’re not holding a camera is because you literally want to record a living scene. This means capturing moving living things ie people and animals. Small people, such as children, are the perfect players for such scenes and are usually more oblivious to being videoed than the older variety as well as being more animated. Be careful with American and French types – excess noise and bright colours may spoil the shot.

When filming locals it may be best to ask permission, some cultures believe you’re capturing their soul while others believe you should pay to have the honour of catching their dog in the corner of your shot. Zoom lenses tend to come into their own at such times.

Finally, there’s another reason why you should keep the camcorder in your bag when you’re planning your award-winning travelogue. Your footage should remind you what a great time and place this was. So, you better have some good times to be reminded of. After all, you’re on holiday.

VideoCamera magazine 1998

Bush TV

Does the Bush Sunrise herald a new dawn or a false one? We peered beneath its virginal white sheen in search of answers to the big questions in life…

There are times in a competitive marketplace when products in a certain price range offering a similar array of features have little to choose between them. That’s why God didn’t rest on the seventh day – he created Bush products. There’s nothing very average about this very reasonable-sounding £170 of TV. Its seasonal white finish immediately singles it out. Unfortunately, it also highlights your second impression, which conjures up the dreaded ‘C’ word – cheap.

If the Sunrise has a target market, it’s at the lower end of a social scale drawn from Harry Enfield characters. Okay, it’s not that bad looking – just remember to put it back in the cellar when you've finished your viewing. At the foot of this rather striking exterior is a fold-down flap that, despite running full across the TV’s front, houses Lilliputian basic controls, all of which have the likely lifespan of Salman Rushdie at a Nation of Islam office party. To the back, there’s a socket for RF in and out and one for the aerial – but nowt else.

Channel search allows your three options: auto, semi-automatic and manual pre-setting. This is around two options too many. The only difference between semi and manual is that the latter requires you to hold down the search button while the stations are being located, while semi saves you the effort. Auto pre-setting takes a few minutes, but the picture is so unclear that we tried it again and checked the aerial. This didn’t improve matters, nor did trying to tune stations in manually.

Another interesting little quirk is the pregnant pause when hopping channels, accompanied by a green screen streaked with a series of horizontal lines. Fine tuning, which is accessed from the function button on the TV or handset, does improve matters, but not as much as you’d hope. The function button also brings up the settings for colour, brightness and contrast, which can only be stored in the memory and later recalled using the Normalisation function.

Other features include Off timer, which works in 30-minute intervals up to two hours, and On-timer, which switches on at any time before returning to standby after two hours if no keys are touched. Current time is also displayed, and as with the above settings, it is recalled using the Time button. For the terminally lazy, a setting function allows you to set which channel you wish to come on first and at what pre-set volume. Teletext functions are extensive. Options include page hold, double letter height, sub-page access, newsflash, updated pages and Fastext access using the colour-coded buttons.

It is impossible to test the CTV1480TS objectively using a signal generator as there are no suitable video inputs. Our subjective viewing suggests that this is easily one of the worst pictures we’ve seen for a while. Perhaps the best thing that can be said is that it lives up to its seasonal white colour by producing a picture in which it appears as if all channels are being broadcast live from a snowstorm somewhere in the Arctic circle. Grain, dot crawl, lack of fine detail – you name it, the CTV1480TS has got the lot. Sound performance, on the other hand, is quite acceptable, except at top volume, and you don’t really need to go that loud.

If you need a 14in TV, enjoy skiing programmes (even when they are not being broadcast), and have exactly £170 to spend, this set is the one for you. In any other circumstances, though, you'd be better advised to look elsewhere.

What Video & TV 1995

App Reviews

Duck Hunt

A right fowl up

The carnivores amongst us may appreciate a plucked duck crisping up nicely under the influence of some fruity marinade, but unless you’re a member of the shootin’ and huntin’ fraternity it can be difficult to work up an appetite to blow them out of the sky. Unless, of course, we’re talking angry zombie ducks – the kind of avian scum that have ruined many a gentle summer evening around the village pond.

So with the little flying bastards in our cross-hairs we set out on a journey to recreate this modern version of the game from our childhood. In this scenario, the furious fowl are trying to escape from Dark Forest and you tap the screens to kill them. If they escape you lose a life, while a high kill rate gets it back. Bullets can be either manually reloaded or will reload automatically after a three second delay.

We were glad to say that the graphics and gameplay pass muster comfortably and using our thumbs instead of an NES gun didn’t spoil our destructive fun. As this is not an official adaptation, we don’t know how long it’s going to be there, so we’d advise you to download now.

At last, another opportunity to give those zombie ducks their comeuppance. Take it now before it’s withdrawn

Jamie Oliver’s 20-minute meals

Lovely, jubbly, grubbly

For all the cheeky chappy patter and granny-kissing charm, Jamie Oliver has managed to avoid nauseating the nation as much as he might. Perhaps it’s because he genuinely seems to care and his televisual adventures frequently put him at odds with fat morons of all ages who seem incapable of grasping his geezer guidance to not poison their own children with pies constructed purely of lard and two-headed chickens.

So we find ourselves quite generously disposed to his latest culinary adventure in the form of the Jamie Oliver 20-Minute Meals app.

It’s fairly intuitive to follow the recipes, which you can scroll through with the flick of the finger you’re not dipping in the marinade. It might not sound as snappy but ‘Jamie Oliver’s 30-40 minute meals provided you remembered to put the rice on’ might have been a more accurate title, but the quality, if not the timing, was vaguely on course.

The price is as cheeky as the man that inspired it but the results were good, however long they really took to make

Gun Bros

The odd-sounding name refers to its titular armed brothers rather than a delayed, if reasonable, response to take out the 80’s pop idols Bros. Once that’s understood, you’ll find it a straightforward action game which requires its two players to use dual virtual joysticks to do no more than shoot as many of their opponents as possible without a princess to rescue in sight. So frantic large-scale butchery rather than philosophical contemplation is the theme of this game for which you are supplied with an infinity of bullets matched only by the number of enemies willing to offer themselves as victims. The backdrop offers variety in the form of the ten planets on which the action takes place.  It froze several times, and the graphics threw up some bugs.

In true mercenary style, you gain more coins the more bad guys you vaporise, and coins only mean one thing in such a world: bigger better weapons. This is where the catch lies. Life being cheap here, the financial return is somewhat meagre. And there’s the rub. Real human money is required to upgrade your cache of arms so whether this becomes a premium game depends on your ability to control your virtual blood lust.  

The Moron Test

Now here’s a game to play in the privacy of your own home – at least until you’ve gained some mastery of it. Similarly, the sense of schadenfreude engendered by your nearest and dearest being classified as a moron will make it one you’ll be happy to pass around the pub or office.

It claims, rather unconvincingly, to draw upon ‘scientifically proven’ tests, but one way or another you’ll have your work cut out to rapidly attain genius status. But within the context of this app’s world, it offers more opportunity to upgrade your official brainpower from village idiot to coruscating intellect than the real world. The tasks mainly involve visual gags, plays on words, and some arithmetic, and will undoubtedly stretch parts of your IQ that might otherwise remain untested by your daily routine.

To be crowned a genius, you have to negotiate four rounds – a process that is somewhat speedier than anything you are likely to have achieved in your early scholastic career. While the 60p it costs may not put you off – the space it occupies might at a fairly greedy 9.2MB. Once, therefore, you’ve earned your intellectual stripes, you may use them to jettison the app and make room for something else more useful. Unless, of course, you really are a moron.

I Journal

Processing words into joy

This is an app with lofty ambitions. It’s based on the principles of the book ‘The Happiness Advantage’ which advocates – to précis and paraphrase – that writing stuff down makes life better. For those over 30, it’s a diary (with templates to help you get going), or to those under, a blog. 

By first creating a free account with Catch.com, you allow syncing and the ability to view and edit your work on the web as well as Android devices. From here you can merge pictures and sound with your text. Gaining your happiness advantage over the other struggling saps out there can be done by drawing attention to certain aspects of your life: such as Gratitude, Exercise, Meditation and Kindness allowing yourself to move from task-based activities to those that are ‘meaning-based’. For those less inclined to hide their lights under bushels, you can share you new found happiness with friends and rivals using email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The journal that drags the diary from beneath the floorboards and onto your social network!  

Blast Monkeys

Monkeys, bananas, cannons. Enough said

Animal lovers and fans of artillery will delight in the opportunity to combine the two in the pursuit of the simian Holy Grail – a ripe bunch of bananas. And there are more of you out there than you might think – two million downloads and counting suggests that the public’s appetite for this sort of entertainment goes way beyond firing angry birds at obnoxious pigs.

The name given to the titular monkey by his digital handlers is Moki and we are told his only real concern in life is getting full on no more or less than three reasonably ripe bananas. Whether, for instance, he reads Nietzsche or not, remains unknown, but certainly he appears to be happy enough existentially despite the limited diet and unusual feeding method. 

The willing monkey guineapig is fired banana-wards from a cannon with a bunch earned for each completed level. The surrealism is advanced by passing bubbles, which allow your monkey’s head to float about for no particular reason. Levels increase sharply in difficulty after the first few stages as new obstacles appear around you.

Advertising on the game is relatively unobtrusive and contributes to it costing you nothing. Thirty new levels have been added and loading times cut although it takes a bit longer the first time you use it.

Who needs angry birds when you have ordnance-friendly monkeys to feed?

Fruit Slice

Fruit for knife nuts

You can have a lot of fun with a fruit. This premise has held true since time immemorial and is consolidated here with this free fruit-bashing extravaganza that is clearly based on the popular Fruit Ninja.

The main difference here is that samurai have replaced the ninjas, whom aficionados of eastern fighting folk will tell you are an altogether more honorable class of warrior. Like the Gestapo, they looked good in their fancy uniforms, and possibly practiced their sword skills by reducing random exotic foodstuffs to pulp. Or not. It’s hardly our job to trace the game’s historical roots, nor its characters’ motivation.

What we do know is that your fruit slices are made with a flourish of your finger across the screen if you are to avoid the angry bombs. Not sure why they are angry but then again a ‘good-natured’ bomb might consider itself in the wrong job. Anyway, more fruit slices, more points, but no prizes; if you want it explained pithily.

The game modes add a little variety. With Pipeline, fruits must be chopped up in a particular order, while One shot requires you to take out whole bunches with, that’s right, just one shot.
If you’re a natural chopper, you’ll love this slice ‘em up, be they bound for cyber chutneys, fruit salads or breakfast cereals.

Refraction

Laser quest

Refraction is not a simple game for simpletons so if you’re not part of its target market, look away now. Yes, I’m talking to you! Okay, you can stay for a bit, but don’t interrupt.

For not only does Refraction require you to exercise a little lateral thinking, but it’s not a facsimile of some game that’s created legions of digital addicts across the phone-bearing world.

Prisms and mirrors are its tools and the Euclidian science of geometry its inspiration so it’s a far squawk from the dubious anthropomorphic delights of angst-ridden avians and peevish pigs. (And no, prism is not where you’re sent when you’ve been bad.)

With these thoughtful tools, you hit balls by manipulating lasers, and these are the kind of lasers that aren’t easily fooled. Even the basic levels are relatively complex and the controls are not that easy to get the hang of either. Multiple solutions are offered for each of its 120 brain teasing levels with decent graphics and controls to keep you honest.

If you’re just not getting enough change from a pound, you can always plump for the free lite version, which still offers you 20 relatively heavy levels and a fair demand on your capacity for logical thinking.

Beware, genuine logical thought required. No pixellated animals were harmed in its making or playing

NHS Direct

Not an app for the truly sick  

This app provides an uncannily accurate reflection of the bricks and mortar service bequeathed to the blitzed British population as part of the post-war settlement.

It’s a marvelous idea but it doesn’t always offer the best service and sometimes you have to wait… and wait. For starters, it took a while to become available, but now that it’s here, it’s disappointing that its most readily given advice is to ring NHS Direct.  So those without this app will be that much higher up the queue to get through on the phone.

Anyway, forgetting the body for the moment, the process won’t tax your mind too much. Under Nature of Problem you select your illness of choice, which is followed by several pages of information about the NHS Direct, the condition of the patient, and how to go about dialing for the emergency services. All possibly useful when you have time on your hands, but perhaps less so when your swollen appendix has inflated with pus and is ready to blow.

As it turned out, our mystery illness was re-directed to the NHS call-back service so we’ll assume that gangrenous swelling on your old man isn’t a priority for treatment. Free medical care ain’t what it used to be.

Much like its inspiration, it’s a great idea that lacks the support to make it work properly.

TechRadar Magazine 2007