The new year has decided to go off with a bang, and it took away two beloved actresses in a matter of a few hours.
British actress Barbara Shelley was probably the classiest of the Hammer ladies – she appeared in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, in The Gorgon, and in Rasputin the Mad Monk. Her presence was so iconic, that many believe to this day that one of her earlier films, Blood of the Vampire, was a Hammer, while it wasn’t.
She was also a star in The Village of the Damned and in the classic Quatermass and the Pit. She also did an awful lot of television, including shows like The Avengers.
Tanya Roberts was an American actress very popular with my age group in the 80s, when she was in Charlie’s Angels before becoming a Bond Girl in A View to a Kill, and a Playmate; she later starred as the Queen of the Jungle herself in Sheena. She also appeared in the fantasy B-movie classic Beastmaster.
Back when I was a kid, we used to go to the movies on New Year’s Day, or in the following Sunday – a film with all the family in the afternoon, and then a stop in a cafeteria or a tea room somewhere for some hot chocolate and a few cookies, and then home to heat up the leftovers from yesterday’s New Year’s Eve dinner or today’s New Year’s Day lunch.
Those days are gone forever, to quote the poet, but I still like to watch a new movie at the start of the new year, and as luck would have it, the masters of the streaming platforms have decided to start distributing on the first day of 2021 Roseanne Liang’s very pulp-ish action thriller Shadow in the Cloud. And so I watched it, and it was a perfect way to start off the year.
So apparently a Russian TV station celebrated the end of 2020 by broadcasting a fake Italian TV show, full of trashy songs and ridiculous guests, including the actresses that starred on the (equally fake) movie “Le quattro putane” (basically “the four hos”). What a fun, classy joke, uh? Happy New Year, you filthy animals.
It is a well known fact that trashy 1980s Italian shows have been a premium export commodity in the last thirty years, gaining a disturbing popularity in parts east, but it’s not so funny when you find out you are the butt of a trans-national joke.
And possibly even more disquieting is the general reaction of the Italian public, that cheered at this ugly thing. Sure, it’s important to be able to laugh at ourselves, but on the other hand, should we really be proud of being considered a nation of dorks, lechers and whores? Asking for a friend…
The shows that the Russians “parodied” were not a high point in our national culture, but certainly left a scar on the psyche of the nation. So much so that many consider such trash an important part of their personal background. I’m probably showing my age, but I do not find it particularly pleasant.
In the end, there is only one thing I can do at this point to balance things off…
Last night I celebrated the end of 2020 by cutting my left thumb while I was chopping an onion – nothing major, thank goodness, but it led me to spend the last hours of the year reflecting on two important issues
first, it is important to always have a well stocked first aid kit at home, especially if the closest emergency ward is 25 KMs away
second, we often underestimate the usefulness of our off-hand’s thumb
Apart from this, one hour before the end (or the beginning), I also got a five-star review for my first Garr the Cunning novella, and a royalty payment notification for The House of the Gods, my dinosaur novel. It was a good way to end 2020 and start 2021. Well, apart from the plaster-wrapped thumb, that is.
We never used fire-crackers and fireworks in our house, and this year the mayor’s office has issued a moratorium on loud bangs for New Year’s Eve, but at least metaphorically and ideally, it really feels good to light up a few rockets and wish 2020 on its way to oblivion.
Happy New Year!
Be good, stay safe, and I’ll see you on the other side.
There’s this thing I’m reading on a lot of blogs, websites and social media profiles these days, about 2020 being a “lost year” – a blank page in our own personal history, a gray-ish limbo in which we floated for roughly ten months, doing nothing, waiting, wasting our time. It’s like many are expecting the system to reset on January the 1st 2021, the slate wiped clean. None of this ever happened.
The first thing I thought reading that line, the lost year, was
ah, it would have been good had it been so for my bank!
Because you know me, I am cheap – and this 2020 maybe was a lost year, but bills and payment notices kept coming regularly, and my mortgage did not go anywhere, or my expenses. So yes, it is true – this was a year of forced idleness, sometimes, with jobs fizzing out and clients disappearing, but on the other hand the machine that needs to be fed with cash kept going as usual.
And yet, for all the strangeness, for me it was a good-ish year. I watched friends lose family members to the illness or to its consequences, but my family was lucky, and we suffered no losses. As I mentioned, jobs vanished and I was trapped in a job from hell with no end in sight – one that damaged my health much more severely than COVID. But I survived.
And I wrote – the year closing with 92 submissions and 28 confirmed sales, that is really good, and means I’ll be able to cover the regular expenses for a few months. Months during which I’ll write more – because my New Year’s resolution is hitting 100 submissions in 2021, and at least 30 sales. It can be done – I am writing a new story in this moment, something I need to submit in the first week of January.
Again on the positive side, I started a podcast with my friend Lucy, and we’re doing great – Paura & Delirio is growing steadily, and there are a few ideas we’re working on for 2021. Not bad, for something we started as a way not to go crazy.
And to start off on a good note – or to end on a good note, depending on what side of the timeline you’re watching this – I’ve just stumbled unwittingly on a wonderful character that’s fallen in the public domain, and that would be a lot of fun to resurrect. I’m checking out resources and things. Who knows…?
So yes, it’s been a lost year to many, it’s been a lost year one way or another for each and every one of us, but we are still going. Stay safe, and hold on.
Karavansara 