What makes good TV?

Over on Facebook, I've been making a load of comments about various TV shows, usually none too complimentary. It's not that I've been rude, it's more that much of what I've been watching hasn't really lit my fire, even when it comes to really popular shows like House or West Wing. Some readers seem to think that I'm simply not taking to American TV, but it's not that at all: I barely watched TV in the UK either for the last couple of years, so I've been catching up on various series on DVD to see what I've been missing, and mostly finding myself disappointed.

I don't like reality TV, I can't stand makeover shows, and I find most talk shows vapid. I really don't like comedy that's too close to my working life, so shows like The Office and the IT Crowd drive me crazy. I don't enjoy police procedurals, particularly not of the CSI vein, and I don't like medical dramas. I don't like gritty depressing reality, I avoid soaps like the plague, and I get bored by "monster of the week" supernaturals.

It's not that they're bad TV. Some shows of these types are really good, and I'm not for a moment denigrating them as a whole. But I've watched way too much TV, and now I'm bored by most of it, just as I'd finding it increasingly hard to find books I like or films that hold me riveted to the screen.

Anyway, one person eventually asked me the obvious question. What do I like?

Ummm.

That's actually a tricky one.

The only broadcast TV shows I've watched in the last year were Top Gear, Mock the Week and QI, and that surprises even me, as they're not really the sort of thing I normally watch.

I like to watch stories: drama, adventure, action, mystery, and intrigue. I like exotic or historical settings, larger than life flamboyant characters, and plots that stretch the imagination and the credulity. I like either a good long story told as a serial, or I like simple, snappy, self-contained episodes that you can pick up piecemeal, rather than "arc" programming where you sort of need to see the individual episodes in order or you can get mixed up. I like touches of humour in serious drama, and I like to be awed and amazed occasionally by both the breadth of the writer's vision and the visual richness. But most importantly, I like not being able to write the next line of the script or being able to predict the plot twists. I like to be surprised.

My tastes aren't defined by any particular genre. I like science fiction, for example: Firefly was superb, Dollhouse was really good, the first three seasons of Babylon 5 were brilliant, I loved the first two seasons of Battlestar, and the recent Sci-Fi channel Dune mini-series were outstanding. On the other hand, Star Trek doesn't do it for me, Farscape was so-so, and I think I grew out of Doctor Who when I was about 15. I can't just say "I like sci-fi". I'm picky. Very, very picky. (Or "selective", as I'd prefer to call it.)

Similarly, Deadwood was one of the most enjoyable series I can remember, but that doesn't mean I want to watch more Westerns. In historical programming, Rome was utterly compelling, (and so utterly different from I Clavdivs), I've watched every episode of Sharpe repeatedly, North and South was good, if dated, but Charles II was dull, and Blackbeard was utterly dreadful. (He was from Bristol, for crying out loud, what on earth possessed them to make him a Scot?) It doesn't have to be serious, either: Middlemen is wonderful cheesy fun, and Warehouse 13 is good, tongue in cheek adventure.

In a nutshell, I never know what I'm going to like, and I often find the shows I like best weren't the shows I expected to like.

I know as well as anyone that there's no such thing as a truly original story: all stories are reworkings of existing material, and there are certain conventions that we expect story-tellers to follow if they're going to produce a "satisfying" story. However, there is still scope for originality. I love genre-crossing - that's why I enjoyed Firefly so much, with its "cowboys in space" riff. I like genuinely unusual characters, not the usual "tired/rebellious/maverick cop with an incongruous taste for jazz/opera/blues", or the formulaic "buddy duo forced to work together who then become friends" (and if they're opposite sex, several seasons of will they, won't they). I'm really looking forward to No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, I wish I'd seen more of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, and I'm thoroughly enjoying watching Young Indiana Jones.

So, in short, my formula for TV success is this:

• Take me to a setting that takes me away from my everyday life;
• Show me characters that aren't cliched, even if they're stereotyped;
• Make me laugh, make me gasp, and surprise me, all in one episode;
• Give me sharp, tight writing, and;
• Either stay faithful to the source if that's what you're doing, or bring together elements that haven't been combined before.

Of course, that's no guarantee of commercial success. If it had been up to me, I'd have turned down most of the successful TV shows of the last 15 years. I'm aware that what I like isn't what you'd call mainstream entertainment.

But that's the beauty of the Net, and it's where machinima and other low-budget or zero-budget techniques really win. No TV company, especially in today's economic climate, can afford to take a chance, but amateurs can. I'm finding more and more that my entertainment needs are supplied by Web series and amateur movies such as The Mercury Men, and their production values are getting better and better.

Elephant's Trunk Nebula

Image (c) Paul Beskeen Astrophotography, 2009.

Wow. This is not a painting. This is the real thing, shot by my friend Paul, using the telescope in his back garden.

Click for more details and more prettiness.

Things To Do In Florida When You're (Feeling) Dead

It's been an interesting week. Not what we planned at all. Last weekend we were supposed to go to Freda's place out in Kissimmee for JC's birthday party and camp out in her garden. As it got dark, we started to see the first flashes of lightning, and by mid-evening, we had a full-on celestial fireworks show. It was truly beautiful, but it was followed, inevitably, by the sky gods dumping about a hundred tons of water on us, flooding our tent completely. So we drove back to Orlando at midnight, and curled up in our nice dry house. Except that it didn't stay nice and dry for long. We woke up to find our hallway under a couple of inches of water. We spent the rest of the day clearing up, and still couldn't work out where it had all come from, even after ripping up the back closet and checking all the pipework. Still, it's all back now, and we're just guessing there was so much rain that the ground became completely waterlogged.

Then, towards the end of the week, I had a two-day migraine, the first in ages, and spent most of the time lying on a sofa feeling sorry for myself and wishing I could buy codeine over the counter like I can in England.

However, despite all that, I seem to have managed to fit a hell of a lot into the last seven days. We're continuing to work our way through the awesome collection of Southern Lady recipes, starting with a chicken and cajun sausage gumbo on Sunday, and ending with lemon pancakes and blueberry syrup for Saturday breakfast. We also took Mollie's totally scrumptious Strawberry Daiquiri pie and the utterly indulgent sweet potato gingerbread with maple pecan butter sauce to the party. (All, I should say, in the spirit of full disclosure, cooked by Anna. I've been rather delinquent in the kitchen this week, apart from cooking a Polish pork stew yesterday.)

Midweek we decided we needed comfort food, and went to the Thai House. It breaks my heart to say it, but The Wrestlers in Cambridge has finally lost its crown as my favourite Thai place. The Thai House's Tom Yum was just the pick-me-up I needed, and their Phad Panang (red curry) is simply, without a doubt, the best I have ever had. We will be back there. As often as we can afford it. Maybe more often than that.

We also got taken out to the Sanford Wine Company by the wonderful Robert Deck, and plied with extremely fine Pinot Noir, including an absolutely superb one from the Elk Cove winery in Oregon. Tomorrow, however, I expect to be the pinnacle of my foodie experience so far: we're going to the Food and Wine Festival at EPCOT, courtesy of the lovely Kal, and we plan to indulge ourselves as much as we possibly can.

Yes. I need new trousers. Pants, if you prefer.

In between eating, I've been watching Diary of a Foodie, again thanks to Robert, and drooling mightily. To counteract all that highbrow culture, I introduced Anna to Crossroads, aka The Karate Kid Plays The Blues, one of my favourite films of the 80s. The story's nothing great (New York kid goes South to learn Robert Johnson's lost song and learn about life, yadda yadda), but it has some damn good lines ("the blues ain't nuthin' but a good man feelin' bad, thinkin' about the woman he once was with"), Jami Gertz is still as cute as I remember her (and way cuter than she was in Lost Boys), and the soundtrack is one of my all-time top movie soundtracks. It's Ry Cooder at his absolute finest (though I wouldn't argue if you countered with Last Man Standing), and Steve Vai plays an absolute blinder as the devil's guitar champion.

We must have been on a real 80s kick last week, because we also watched part 2 of the 80s Patrick Swayze Civil War epic North and South and concluded that they were all (a) stupid (b) unpleasant or (c) both. It's cheesy as hell, but completely addictive, and now we're wondering whether we need to watch part 3. I suspect we do, if only to find out what happened to Miss Ashton, a superbitch to rival anything in Dynasty or Dallas.

To restore the balance (this week seems to have involved a lot of getting things in balance) we went out one mild day (in other words a mere 25C/77F rather than the usual 33C/91F) and visited some actual American history, in the shape of the Leu Gardens Museum House. It's a quaint little place, about 120 years old. I'm still trying to get used to the fact that in 1850, there was absolutely nothing here at all, just some empty swamp land. By 1880, there were still only a few houses here, and it wasn't until just over 100 years ago, when Henry Flagler built a railroad down to Orlando, this city even existed. It's like living in Sim City, where things really do start on Jan 1, 1900. We couldn't help it, though. We came away with a book of recipes from the 1900s, for which we paid a mighty $2.

Still on the historical theme, I also read another unmemorable book about Florida in the Civil War (no, really, dear historians, nothing at all of any significance happened, no matter how much you try and convince me that Florida was a vital part of the Confederacy), a book about the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Florida, Florida's Lost Tribes, and two books about the history of Winter Park, which were fascinating in the way that local history books always are: in other words, a load of instantly forgettable trivia that make you feel like you know the place a little better than you did before.

I also ripped my way through Stephen Fry's time-travel alternate history romp Making History, and gave up on both Beat by Amy Boaz and the DC comic of Michael Moorcock's Multiverse. I'm not sure when I stopped liking Moorcock. I used to read him obsessively in my teens, and could quote Elric pretty much chapter and verse. Then about ten years ago I picked up some of his newer stuff and found it unreadable. I'm not sure whether he changed or I did, but I just can't handle his self-indulgent bombast any more.

Highlight of the week, though was a book Darien has been bugging me to read since I got here, The Lightning Thief, a "young adult" book which messes with the world of Greek mythology. After the endless vampires and Harry Potters, it's a refreshing change to read something that takes classical archetypes, updates them, and makes a cracking good read. I've got book 2 by the bed, and am looking forward to reading that when I've finished The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures, by R Garcia y Robertson, which is a great collection of short stories.

Yes, I got a Winter Park library card. It's another stage in getting myself legal and proving I actually live with Anna, prior to filing all the immigration paperwork. We also have a joint bank account now, and the lease is in both our names. Next week's big job is to take my UK medical records to a local doctor who will, I hope, certify that I'm fit and healthy, and won't insist on repeating all my childhood immunizations. I don't fancy feeling sick for a couple of weeks, let alone go through the hassle of actually having more jabs, and I sure as hell don't want to pay $500 for a load of injections I don't need.

Oh, and let's not forget that we rounded off the week with not one, but two art shows. I've really started to like Vaughn Belak's work, and we ended up at his show A Little Bit Haunted, chatting about Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs, and how he would look if Vaughn painted him. Here are just a few of his pictures.

Not bad for a week where we didn't do much, really.

Motormouse, and other musical treats

I reckon I've heard more live music in the last seven weeks than the preceding seven years. This, dear readers, is a Very Good Thing.

The highlight, of course, was the utterly surreal Motörmouse gig a couple of weeks ago. We got back from honeymoon to discover an excited tweet from someone saying that Motorhead were playing at the House of Blues in a couple of days' time. Anna, it turned out, had never seen them, so I immediately demanded we get tickets. They were supported by the Reverend Horton Heat, who I know only from Psychobilly Freakout on Guitar Hero 2. Strange mix, but never mind.

It wasn't until we got to the House of Blues that I realised we were actually in Walt Disney World. Motorhead. Disney. Motorhead. Disney. Does not compute. Let me just quote Lemmy as he walked on stage: "Hello, Orlando, we are Motorhead, and this is Disney. Fuckin' hell."

It was bloody good fun though. We drank nasty overpriced Pabst beer, Rev HH were fantastic, Motorhead were bloody loud, and I got to feel really old when Lemmy introduced tracks off Another Perfect Day with "we wrote this before most of you were even born." Still, I still can't quite accept that I saw Motorhead play Disney. It's just wrong. I only know it really happened because Vaughn took pictures.

Aside: last Friday we saw It Might Get Loud at the Enzian, which features a clip of Jimmy Page playing air guitar. That's another reality check right there. If you're a guitarist, you have to see that movie.

However, most of what we've been seeing have been amateur blues bands. There's a regular Tuesday night blues jam at the Island Oasis, and another at the Alley in Sanford on Thursdays. They're both small dive bars, but they serve cheap beer and awesome blues. And I do mean awesome. I've never, ever heard a blues band in England that could even come close to what these guys do. There's a hard core of about a dozen of them that do both, and then some people go to one or the other, and they just get up and play.

The mix is so varied it's incredible. We saw a sax player who must have been 70, up on stage with a kid who probably wasn't old enough to be drinking coffee, let alone beer. There are a couple of ladies there who have voices that'll rip your heart out from a hundred paces without a microphone. There are guitar players to make you weep with envy, and they play just about every style you can think of. We've heard Lynyrd Skynyrd style Southern rock, we've heard Mississipi delta blues, we've heard Clapton, you name it, we've heard it.

Down here, these guys have the blues in their blood. They're born to it. I'm just itching to get hold of a guitar and get on the stage with them, even though I know I'm never going to be as good as the teenagers, let alone the guys who've been playing since before I was born. It's a wonderful, amazing experience. If you fancy yourself as a blues player, get your butt over here, and come listen to this. They're a really welcoming bunch, and if you bring an instrument, or you're prepared to take the mic, they'll be only to happy for you to join in.

We've also managed to catch a bunch of other bands in bars all around the place. Wherever you go, there's music, and they're all fun. and mostly they're pretty damn good.

In the Copper Rocket the other night, there was a band called Vanda, who started off OK, but once they got into the swing of it, they ended up as a sort of country rock B-52s. In another bar in Sanford, we caught a one-man show, and in my favourite bar in the world, Stogies, in St Augustine, there were two brothers with guitars who were marvelously entertaining.

Hmm, I've just realised that makes it sound like all we do is go to bars. That's not true. We do go to other places as well. For example, for a complete change of pace, we saw a Polynesian dance troupe at the Science Center who demonstrated music and dance from several different islands.

I like this America place. I reckon it's got a lot going for it.

Acorn squash soup

I forget who it was who asked for the recipe for the soup I did for last week's pie party, so here you go. You can all have it. It came from a 1994 annual of recipes from Southern Living which we picked up in the library for about $2.

Cut 2 large acorn squash in half, deseed them, and boil them for about 30 minutes. Let them cool, peel 'em, and mush 'em.

While the squash is cooling, chop up a large onion, and saute it slowly in 1/4 cup of butter for about 20 minutes until soft. Add 6 cups of chicken broth (stock), 1 1/2 cups of dry white wine (cheap stuff will do) and the squash, and simmer for 10 minutes. Turn the heat off, add 2 tbsp of lime juice, the zest of a lime, and 1/4 tsp pepper, and allow to cool.

Blend until smooth and add 1 cup whipping cream. Garnish with chopped chives or parsley if you feel so inclined, and serve cold or warm with cornbread. (I prefer warm.)

Easy or what?

You can use pretty much any squash if you don't have acorn. It comes out more or less the same. Try these creamy fall soups as well, also from Southern Living (Oct 2003): I rather fancy curried acorn squash and apple soup.

Everything was homemade and vegetarian, so it had to be healthy, right? And the more of it we ate, the healthier we got.

I'm not going to post recipes for the shoo-fly pie, sweet potato pie, Anna's banana chocolate cream death pie or her amazing diabetes-inducing pear and apple cobbler.* Go and get a copy of Mrs. Rowe's little book of Southern Pies by Mollie Cox Bryan. It's a wonderful book - get it from the library and check it our first if you don't believe me. You'll end up buying it.

*The cobbler's not included in the pie book. That came from a Southern Lady special, adapted by Anna, and I have no idea what she did. It's probably not safe to be let loose on human beings, though, unless medical assistance and insulin are on hand. Think of me as your friend.

Honeymoon in St Augustine

We're finally home after a few days exploring St Augustine. We've been there several times before (a year ago when we fell in love, at Christmas when we went to see the lights, and last summer when we got engaged), but this is the first time we've had the opportunity to actually look around. It's a beautiful town, the oldest in the US. It's practically unchanged in the last 100 years, so it has a real sense of history to it. (Actually, that's a lie, but more on this in a later blog post.) We'd both love to end up living there if we can afford it and we can deal with the practical issues of kids & schools & jobs, and so it was the natural choice for our wedding and honeymoon.

Look away now, folks. Matt & Anna get mushy on the beach.

I was smitten by a nasty cold last week (great timing, eh?) so it was a little more subdued than we were expecting, but we still managed to fit in a lot.

The Fort (Castillo de San Marco, St Mark's Fort, Fort Marion - it's had many names in the last 400 years) is one of the star-pattern fortresses that you no longer see in Europe. It's successfully defended the city ever since it was built. It's been occupied by the Spanish, French, English and Americans, and was still in use a hundred years ago. The place is a testament to the power of cannon: no ship was able to sail down the Matanzas River past the fort. It was also well night impregnable to anything the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries could throw at it. It's built from coquina, which is basically compacted seashells, and cannonballs just bounced off it.

Anna gets something powerful between her thighs.

A short way along the seafront from the fort is Harry's, one of the restaurtants that everybody - and I mean everybody - told us we had to try. It's a chain, but don't let that put you off. It was, quite simply, superb. It's a specialty seafood place, so I couldn't eat most of what was on the menu, and settled instead for Louisiana pork tenderloin, which came with a mushroom pepper sauce. I have never, ever tasted pork so good. Definitely a place to revisit every time we go.

Harry's. In case you missed it earlier, they serve the best pork ever. Really.

We had originally intended to get married in the courtyard of The Lightner Museum, but that plan fell through when they told us how much it would cost. So instead, we just wandered round it. The place is a glorious pseudo-Spanish former hotel and casino that houses the most insane collection, of, well, collections. Lightner was a rich eccentric (there are a lot of those in St Augustine's history) who founded Hobbies magazine and collected other people's collections. It didn't matter what they were collections of, he wanted them. As he was dying, he bought the old Hotel Alcazar and created a museum for all his stuff. It's just completely, totally random, and it's a joy to walk around, as you have absolutely no idea what you're going to find next.

The Lightner Building. Looking out from this window: you can see the tower reflected.

The building also houses an enormous Victorian swimming pool and steam bath, which is just pure steampunkery. More on the swimming pool later: for now, I'll just mention the circa 1910 poster which was advertising displays by young ladies of stunts performed in the swimming pool. The poster noted that the ladies would be wearing specially designed costumes that would help gentlemen appreciate their athleticism, and pointed out that the show was not designed to stimulate prurient interest, but to aid in the understanding of the health benefits of swimming. Right. That'd be like the three entrances to the magnificent Ponce de Leon hotel, then. The main entrance, the ladies' entrance, and the entrance for unaccompanied ladies round the back, out of view of any of the churches.

The steam room.

Cellar 6 was an oddity. It felt too upmarket for St Augustine, as if it really wanted to be in Manhattan. It was pleasant enough, the food was good, and the service was excellent, but somehow, not what I was looking for.

Later that evening we took a romantic moonlight carriage ride around the city. Our driver, Will, was obviously suffering from end of season tour guide fatigue, and his commentary was laced with an unexpected level of cynicism and acerbic wit. Actually, that made it a lot more fun than the usual tourist nonsense. The one thing that sticks in my mind is that the one guest house that claims not to be haunted is a former funeral parlor - and they don't put that on the brochures!

St Augustine at night.

We kicked off our last day in town with a trip round the Villa Zorayda, another wonderful folly built by a rich eccentric, Franklin W. Smith. Allegedly a tenth-scale replica of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, it's nothing of the sort. It's a private home inspired by Moorish architecture which incorporates some styling from the Alhambra, and is home to a lot of amazing artifacts. In its time, it's also been a club, restaurant, casino, and speakeasy, and it just oozes character. The surprising thing about the place is that the architecture is actually really shoddy, especially in comparison to the beautiful objects it's filled with. It looks great, but as soon as you get close, you see how crude and garish it actually is. Still, a fascinating visit and well worth an hour or so.

It's as crazy inside as out.

OK, remember that swimming pool? That's where we went for lunch. They drained it, and filled it with antique shops and a rather fabulous little restaurant, the Alcazar. There's something wonderfully surreal about sitting on the bottom of a swimming pool to eat, especially when a guitarist starts playing show tunes in a flamenco style. The beef and vegetable soup was thick and nourishing, and just what I needed. I followed with blackened chicken and parmesan sauce on linguini, and we finished up with a super-creamy key lime cheesecake.

The Alcazar restaurant. The water level was just below the tops of the archways.

That set us up nicely for a tour round the San Sebastian Winery. Florida wines aren't exactly the world's greatest, since muscadine grapes are so damn sweet you can't really do much with them. However, a free tour and complimentary tasting isn't something to turn down! Our guide, Stephen, was really good; he knew his stuff, and he was entertaining and informative, pitching his spiel at just the right level. As a European who's used to brewing wine in the airing cupboard, it was odd to see that they had to cool the must to bring it down to fermentation temperature, not warm it. To be honest, most of the wines weren't to my taste, but their sherry and port was extremely pleasant.

Stephen extolling the virtues of Florida port and sherry.

We finished off the day at our two favourite places, the Tasting Room and Stogies. I've talked about them before, so I'll just say that they were as good as always. After the tasting at the winery, we were already a little tipsy, and then we moved on to tasting more champagnes and Spanish reds, then ports. I think we must have sampled nearly two dozen drinks and a dozen dishes that day. Perfect. We ended the evening out on our balcony at midnight, looking out over St Augustine and dreaming of coming here again when we can afford it.

Our balcony at the Casa de Solana, a charming B&B.

We took the scenic route home, and went via Anastasia Island, on the other side of the Matanzas River. I finally got to a beach in Florida: the Anastasia State Park. It was almost completely deserted, which was wonderful, and we just sat quietly looking out at the ocean and watching pelicans and other seabirds until we got hot and thirsty.

The Atlantic. Some sand. Some grass. Anna.

We then stopped off at Stir It Up, a little hippie surfer food place by the beach, and gorged ourselves on organic quesadillas and enormous turkey sandwiches and totally yummy smoothies. It's the kind of place you'd drive right by if you didn't know it was there, and quite frankly, that's a good thing. If lots of people found it, it'd get all popular and wouldn't be neartly so good. In fact, forget I mentioned it. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along now.

This is the only clue you get. If you can find this place, eat there.

We carried on down the coast, making just one more stop, the delightful Washington Oaks State Gardens. There was a special deal over the weekend, and all State Parks were free to anyone with a Florida library card, which is kinda cool. It combines natural riverside habitat with formal gardens, and was absolutely filled with gloriously coloured butterflies. Anna was entranced by an enormous grey grass carp: it's the largest of the minnow family, and really rather impressive. We stayed there and relaxed in the shade by the water for a while, until finally it was time to head off back down I-95 to Winter Park and real life.

The only place I know that compares to this for sheer beauty is Rudyard Lake.

Despite not feeling at my best, it was a thoroughly enjoyable few days. I suspect we'll be doing this again for future birthday/wedding anniversary celebrations, until we can afford to buy the house we both want so much.

There are loads more pictures on Anna's Flickr site, and shortly on mine too.

Leapin' Lizards!

One of the things I like about this place is that there are lizards everywhere. And, to my surprise, they jump!