Downton..

Abbey: a portal to the past.

Everyone knows that England has big houses and until The National Trust either turned the owners out to fend for them selves- Lords and Ladies living feral in the bushes -or confined to a roped off a small area .. locked in a hidden room at the end of a long corridor.

The masses lived within their reservation, much as the rich lived upon their Capability Brown park land.

Everyone knew his place and there was order in the land.

People wore clothes appropriate to their station in life because it was very important to know who could be trusted to make tea; and there were wars in distant lands which provided wealth for the big houses. Selling guns is business.. Each segment of society worked together in a satisfyingly stratified way, and every man had his own problems to be worked out within the rules of his class...

Must admit I like fantasy, Dan Simmons’s Drood is a perfect pitch of black humour that I love so well, but Downton Abbey was, until a few minutes ago, just one of those things a lot of people watch on tele. The snippets I watched on YouTube put me in mind of, 'Upstairs Downstairs' so Downton is obviously a tried and tested formula, guaranteed to please the people who like that sort of thing.

I wouldn't have bothered to YouTube it, but I read this in an interview about funding for the BFI:

 "There has been the thinking in the past that public money should only go into films that can't get any investment anywhere else..."When you actually analyse that it means it should only go into films that nobody could conceivably want to see and there's no logic in that - you want to make a film-friendly, audience-friendly industry."

As told to Sky News by Downton Abbey creator and Conservative peer Julian Fellowes, a member of Lord Smith's review panel due to publish their report into government policy on film funding on Monday.

As everyone now knows, The Germans, Finish, Swedes...everyone in Europe finds this film (shown each New Year Eve) hilarious.

We should make more tv like this and forget those artsy films no one can understand. Which leads on to....gun running, artsy films....and Century 21.

Out of the banal and mundane, into to Teeth of the Sea with images from "Century 21" by Jeremy Blake (2004)

Jeremy Blake made three animations powered by the curious tale of Sarah Winchester, the wife of Mr Winchester---rifle man. When first her baby daughter and then her husband died in 1880, Sarah was a very rich and very sad woman. She went to see a medium who told her that she was haunted by the spirits; everyone who had ever been killed by a Winchester rifle.

The cure, said the medium, was to keep building- night and day -rooms and staircases, windows in floors, doors that open onto sheer drops, to keep building never to stop.

This is the Winchester house- hard to find good films as most Winchester YouTubes are uploaded by annoying American 'Paranormal' investigators.

Alton Towers...