What?

In the run-down (count-down? run-up?) to the New Year, a little snack to keep you busy before the main attraction:

He's really much too lovely to be just a place-marker, but there you have it: life can be so unfair sometimes. Anyway, he can take consolation from the certain knowledge that, if circumstances arose, I'd do him.

Er... carry on, people: nothing to see here.

Going underground

A kind reader sent me a link to a site which featured numerous tiny but brilliantly evocative images of the Paris Metro.

Or, in truth, parts of the Paris Metro that us ordinary punters will never see.

Because it was a site made by someone who is into "urban exploration", fearlessly exploring those bits of the city that some official or other would rather you stayed out of...

... often, it must be said, because they have a solicitous attitude to your safety, but sometimes just because it's more convenient to keep you out.

Our fearless Urbanaut will have none of that, and he sees nothing wrong in diving into tunnels where trains are operating over the live rails and where there is no room for them to squeeze past him unless he can reach, in time, a tiny alcove.

And, provided he's a sane person taking measured decisions, and that he's there to explore not to interfere, I have to say I don't think I could argue he should not be able to do so.

And the fact that he's treated the rest of us to these delightful images merely confirms my own selfish support for him. Let me know if you want the link. And my thanks, again, to my generous reader.

Dogging

Isn't it strange how just a single image can make you want to see a particular film?

That was from Dog Pound (a modern US copy of Alan Clark's definitive borstal movie Scum), released on DVD on 3 January.

Who's the Daddy?

Sentinel

Isn't that just the sweetest little thing?

It's a model of a Sentinel steam shunting locomotive.

In 1/76th scale, in case you were wondering, so it's no more than two or three inches long.

It's based on the London & North Eastern Railway's Class Y1 engines, which were first introduced in 1925.

They were intended for very light yard work (this was a time when practically every single item of produce or manufactured goods was moved by rail so every tiny village had its own freight services, all of which needed to be shunted).

Incredibly economical (they consumed just 15lbs of coal per mile), the first six were so useful that more were built.

After Nationalisation, the jobs for which they were useful rapidly declined, and many of the engines were sold to industry to operate private sidings in factories and mills.

The remainder were used mainly for engineering jobs, something they had done before Nationalisation -- here in 1938 an LNER-branded engine is repairing the sea walls on the Lowestoft-Yarmouth line of the old M&GN system:

These delightful models are due for release imminently.

I have no use for them whatsoever, but I am itching to buy one. Or more. They are, to me, just irresistibly cute.

Fruity

I nearly overlooked this chap, a bit put-off by his mad, staring eyes.

It was only at the second glance that I realised he was just being very enthusiastic.

While his smile (either beaming or of contentment) conveyed even more eloquently his enthusiasm for, er, rubbing one out.

The giggly smile in this next one provides all the confirmation anyone might require.

And so he sets to work with gusto... or, rather, it isn't really "work" at all, since he so clearly delights in what he is doing.

Yes, that's what I like to tell myself about these models as I ingest prodigious quantities of porn.

Ups and downs

Decades after it was broadcast, people just assume that 1981's Brideshead Revisited, possibly the UK's finest-ever made-for-telly costume drama, was produced by the BBC.

In fact it was made by Granada, a long-lost (and much lamented) part of the ITV network.

An intriguing costume drama battle has recently broken out between those old adversaries, with ITV's Downton Abbey (above) wowwing the critics and audiences a couple of months back, and the BBC's just-broadcast made-over revivification of long-running 1970s soap Upstairs Downstairs (below) also being reasonably well received.

For my money, ITV has won this contest. Downton had a larger cast of characters, something that conveyed well the "small town" feel of a large English country house, whereas Upstairs with its more restricted town-house setting and smaller cast felt more claustrophobic.

Both series featured radicalised and handsome chauffeurs -- Downton with an Irish socialist (played by Alan Leech, above, looking devastatingly handsome in that uniform); Upstairs, intriguingly, with a Mosleyite Fascist (below):

British flirtations with fascism rarely appear in popular culture, so it's always a bit startling to see British Union of Fascist logos displayed, Nazi-style, on public buildings.

But we know there were large numbers of people who engaged with this evil, which was vigorously supported, of course, by that liberal and reasonable newspaper the Daily Mail.

My God, those Fascists were good at graphic design.

Downton had rather more running time to play with than Upstairs, but even so its storylines were rather more gripping. Upstairs also threw away one of its biggest cards -- the appearance of utterly gorgeous actor Nico Mirallegro.

He featured heavily in episode 1, easily the most, er, interesting character, but was written out of the plot before the hour was up (yes, yes, I know he came back for about a minute towards the end of the final episode, but there were certainly no more delicious topless shots like this one):

What intriguing little nipples he has...

Actually Downton did something similar, featuring a queer aristocratic played by Charlie Cox.

Alas, after giving us an all-too-brief glimpse of good chest hair, he summarily disappeared never really to re-appear (alright, he did, but it was very brief. And with no chest hair). Here's a reminder of what Charlie Cox's chest hair looks like:

Um... where was I?

Yes, Downton also won on the prestigious casting stakes, Upstairs' heavyweight Eileen Atkins easily being outgunned by Downton's double-barrelled Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton.

Although, in all fairness, Upstairs tried to play another trump card with the inclusion in its cast of the delightful Blake Ritson (spoiling it by making his appearances far too brief):

You must remember Blake? He was the schoolboy object of obsession of the incredibly creepy paedophile German schoolmaster in extraordinarily dark comedy series The League of Gentlemen...? No...? Well, here Blake is playing the Duke of Kent, which I guess is an increase in social status if nothing else.

That reminds me: I don't think I've spent enough time telling you about Nico Mirallegro yet.

Here he is in some other programme.

No idea what, but it seemed to involve him taking all his clothes off.

Except that when he had a bath, mysteriously, he kept his pants on. Which, I think we can all agree, is a crying shame.

Back to the original point (yes, there was one). Downton and Upstairs are both enjoyably soapy romps, but neither of them has the bottom of Brideshead. I suspect that's because neither of them are fortunate enough to have such a heavyweight anchor as this novel:

Although, having written all that, I have not (yet) reviewed 2008's film of Brideshead, so I suppose I ought to withhold further judgement until then. Still, at least that will give me another chance to post lots of images of Nico Mirallegro. Er...

PS: Bugger it. Forgot to include these:

It is, of course, Nico Mirallegro, giving good, er, Nico.

I can't imagine what made me forget them: must have been trying to keep them back for my exclusive pleasure, or some such. Sorry.

Thinking of England

He looks like an utterly delightful chap:

He's here to illustrate a particular sub-genre of gay porn: what I think of as the "Lying back and thinking of England" sub-genre.

This sub-genre (let's call it a genre from now on, shall we?) derives, I think, from the typical gay fantasy of "let's molest a straight man".

In this, some archetypal specimen of masculine hunkiness is objectified by The Gay.

It's usually important that the specimen (or "object") is hyper masculine, sll muscley and sporty...

Then, for some flimsy reason or other, we get to strip him:

Bizarrely (well, this is a fantasy) he is not at all offended and, instead, shows obvious signs of arousal and excitement.

We get to try out our rude desires on him, titillating and stimulating him.

There may even be an occasional sign that he is, in fact, into this, a cooperative move on his part to expose some different feature for our (and, presumably, for his) sexual pleasure.

What is without doubt is that he becomes a willing -- perhaps even enthusiastic -- conspirator in our seduction/molestation.

We engage in our desires with horny enthusiasm, perhaps (this tending to be an early fantasy) more enthusiastic than skillful or imaginative.

It doesn't matter: throughout, our hyper-masculine object is, perhaps perversely, a textbook example of passivity, clearly being done to rather than doing.

Hence, he reminds me of nothing so much as the stereotypically prim Victorian middle class woman, just lying back and thinking of England while her man does unspeakable things to her in the name of rooting sexuality.

Nice...