Much of this site was first written in 2006. Firmly tongue in cheek, the site was written a world away during lunch breaks in a grey government building in beautiful New Zealand when I needed a creative outlet to offset the mental energy poured into a boring postgraduate professional degree to help me along in my boring profession. Much of the content dates from that time and place, before social media. Before the financial crisis. Before so many things.
Life events, including becoming a boring professional, moving to the other side of the world and acquiring a ’London’ lifestyle ended up taking over and the site sank from obscurity to nothingness.
But now the time feels right for this site to be resurrected on the day before this country is about to start a long bank holiday weekend to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. The silliness has ramped up rapidly over this very short working week. Bunting abounds, the Elizabeth Line is celebrated as the best thing to ever go to Abbey Wood, there’s a competition on Twitter to design the Queen’s Jubilee knickers and everyone is waiting with baited breath for Meghan Markle to somehow ’ruin everything’. Britain may not make it out of this weekend alive.
So what better thing to do when one feels the country is on the brink of Jubilee induced batshit insanity than to take refuge in the memory of Martin from V? Back when telly was good, back when telly was a shared viewing experience talked about incessantly in the playground the next day, back when there was a common sense of narrative and you could say things and they meant something.
Because now for some reason a television show about the brazen erosion of our hard won democratic institutions, news cycles that diminish moral standards daily, and imminent environmental disaster no one wants to acknowledge suddenly feels more relevant than ever.
The stories are well crafted and the acting in the original mini-series is superb. It couldn’t be more of the moment.
Frank Ashmore, wherever you are now, thank you for Martin, its been nearly 40 years and I still love that guy. I hope you are well and wish you all the very best.
Platinum Jubilee Weekend 2022
When Martin Died 