Electoral Services questionnaire

Interesting. I've just reconfirmed my eligibility to vote in elections in Leeds, prompted by a letter about it which arrived yesterday. I did the actual confirmation online, and after I'd done so a text popped up asking me to fill in a survey on my experiences of the election process in Leeds. Naturally, being geekily interested in these things, I took the opportunity. Most of the questions were, as I expected, on fairly simple / basic things, such as how easy I find postal voting, how regularly I vote, and what experience (if any) I'd had with contacting our local Electoral Services Department. This one, though, really made the electoral reformer in me sit up and pay attention (click if it's too small to read, and you should get the original):


I'd already said in a previous answer that I always vote in all elections, so I couldn't say that any of those would make me more likely to vote, but I hardly wanted to anyway. What a dreadful set of options! Thankfully, they offered a box underneath so that I could explain my answers:


The people administering this questionnaire are Electoral Reform Services, whose business is precisely this - to provide the voting apparatus for surveys and elections. They happen to be partially-owned by the Electoral Reform Society, who know all about STV as their primary purpose is to campaign for it, and indeed share my concerns with online voting and voter ID too - but they won't have had any input into the questions for this. Rather, the questions seem to have come from the Electoral Commission, who are responsible for running and ensuring the fair conduct of public elections in this county, and have here employed Electoral Reform Services to conduct the survey. Since some of the questions referenced types of elections which don't apply in Leeds (e.g. mayoral contests), I assume the same survey is being offered to people confirming their electoral eligibility online all over the country.

Given all that, it worries me a lot to see these questions, as it suggests a very real risk of the methods listed being introduced (or extended, in the case of voter ID which has already been piloted to poor effect) in this country. And yet still no prospect of any actual improvements to our electoral system, such as STV. :-( I only hope they get a lot of responses along the same lines as mine, basically saying "All these ideas are rubbish - STV NOW!"

If you share my concerns and get the chance to fill in this questionnaire yourself, please feel very free to use my answers as inspiration.

22. Mary Shelley (2017), dir. Haifaa al-Mansour

Oops, I've let a bit of a film review back-log accrue again... Let's see what I can do about that this afternoon.

I saw this one with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House. I found it OK, with some good performances, period settings and nice camerawork conveying an appropriately Gothic atmosphere where relevant (as in the Villa Diodati) but without undermining the basic realism of the film. Unfortunately, though, it plays pretty fast and loose with the actual facts of Mary's life - which was part of my complaint about The Happy Prince and Oscar Wilde (LJ / DW). Overall, it didn't irritate me anything like as much as The Happy Prince, because Mary simply wasn't a smug, entitled arse in the way that Oscar Wilde was, and nor was the film quite so intent on portraying her life as a tragic work of art. But it definitely did want to suggest that absolutely everything which happened to her before the publication of Frankenstein was all systematically and almost divinely destined to culminate in the production of that book, which didn't actually leave much space for her agency as a human author rather than a passive cork, tossed on the waves of life.

Here are just a few examples of the departures from reality which I noticed, based on the pre-holiday reading I did for our DracSoc trip to Geneva in 2016, and the exhibitions we saw while we were there (LJ / DW):

Film	Reality
Mary meets Percy Shelley while staying with the Baxter family in Scotland, after she has been sent away there by her stepmother.	Mary literally missed meeting Shelley for the first time because of this stay, as he came to London while she was away after securing the patronage of her father, William Godwin. They met only after she had returned, during his regular visits to the family home.
Neither Mary nor any of the Godwin household initially know that Percy has a wife and child, and Mary finds this out to her shock when they turn up outside her father's bookshop to ask where he is.	All of them already knew all about the wife and child well before Mary became involved with Percy, because he had brought them to the Godwin family home to introduce them to everyone (though Harriet did turn up demanding for Mary and Percy to be kept apart once the relationship had begun).
Mary and Claire first set eyes on Byron at a theatrical demonstration of Galvinism, complete with experiments on frogs' legs.	It was actually at a lecture on Milton delivered by Coleridge. Mary's knowledge of Galvinism came later, through conversations at the Villa Diodati.
Percy's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg sexually assaults Mary in their home, in a move which comes as a complete surprise and (obviously) a shock to her.	Percy had suggested to Mary in advance that she and Hogg should sleep together, and although she hated the idea at first, they corresponded about it. In those letters Mary seems interested but wary, but nothing ever came of it in the end.
Byron invites Percy and Mary to stay in his villa in Geneva and welcomes them as soon as they arrive.	Claire conceives of the whole notion of tracking him down there and persuades the others to follow. They arrive two weeks before Byron and spend the intervening time in a hotel, waiting for him to turn up.
Mary writes the bulk of Frankenstein in run-down rented rooms in London.	She wrote most of it while travelling onwards through Switzerland and into Italy after the Geneva stay.

Many more things are omitted, such as Mary and Claire's other siblings, Shelley bursting into the Godwin family home to propose a suicide pact with Mary as a way of escaping Harriet, and an earlier elopement to the continent by Mary and Percy (taking Claire with them). I am less concerned about omissions, which are necessary to convey a story coherently in the length of the film, but the distortions of reality here actively worked against one of the central claims of the film. On the one hand, it kept trying to show us how her life fed into her work, but on the other it wasn't even presenting her real life, but another fictionalised life which did not in fact lead up to the novel we know.

I could appreciate and give credit for some of what the production team were trying to do in the course of this, such as showing clearly how difficult it was for a woman to be taken seriously as an author in the early 19th century, as well as the brutal and disastrous consequences of the patriarchy generally and Byron and Shelley's notions of free love particularly for women with no access to contraception. But I felt that some other narrative decisions made for serious missed opportunities, and that applied particularly to the real complexities, drama and evident intellectual calibre of her relationship with Shelley, all of which were largely thrown away in favour of a pretty conventional troubled romance story.

In short, I'm glad I saw this (because I was always going to want to) and it's certainly better than The Happy Prince, but it could still have been an awful lot better than it was.

23. The Pirates of Blood River (1962), dir. John Gilling

I watched this because it is a Hammer film with Christopher Lee in it. Well, I mean and Michael Ripper and Oliver Reed and Marie Devereux (too briefly!) and Andrew Keir and Desmond Llewellyn and a bunch of other favourites - but mainly because of Christopher Lee. It isn't a horror film, though, but rather one of Hammer's swash-buckling adventures, as the title suggests. And for all the pirateyness, it involves the minimum possible amount of screen-time set on board ship, because obviously Hammer couldn't have dreamt of affording that. Rather, they bought in some stock footage for the beginning, built an interior cabin set, commissioned a matte painting of a sea-scape for the end, and set the rest on an island which is very obviously Black Park with a few half-dead palm fronds stuck around the place.

This means that the plot feels more like a Wild West adventure set on the Pitcairn Islands than anything else - although in fact both the islanders and the pirates who come to attack them are French. The islanders consist of a Huguenot colony who have been living in isolation for several generations now, and a fundamental tension has developed amongst them between the strict and traditionally-minded elders of the community and the younger generation who want something different and less oppressive. The analogy here for the real-world contemporary tensions between the pre- and post-war generations is obvious, and there's some interesting stuff about how both sides have their own competing interpretations of what the colony's original founder (old Symeon) stood for. But ultimately this aspect of the story rather peters out, eclipsed by the attack of the pirate gang (led by the lovely Mr. Lee) who come to raid the settlement and abscond with the treasure which they are (rightly) convinced it must be hoarding.

The sexual politics are very typical of Hammer during this period, in that they are playing around with the flouting of traditional values, but ultimately don't quite want to condone their overthrow. Early on, we are invited to sympathise with a young woman (Marie Devereux's character), who is afraid of her brutal husband (one of the traditionally-minded village elders), and has fallen in love instead with one of the young idealists. But ultimately these two cannot be allowed to have a sustained relationship or happy ending, because that would be to condone adultery. Instead, she isn't quite killed directly for her sins, but in trying to escape a crowd of villagers bent on punishment, she runs into a river where she is devoured by piranhas (hence the 'Blood River' of the title). Effectively, then, she is punished by God - or whatever divine agency you might want to imagine.

Christopher Lee is of course absolutely great as the pirate captain, who obviously has enough education and breeding by comparison with his men to convince the same young idealist that he will help him to overthrow the village elders and create a better community, but is in fact utterly ruthless and ready to sacrifice anyone at all in pursuit of the treasure he desires. In other words, it is the perfect Christopher Lee role. He gets a good death scene towards the end, which involves him being pinned to a tree with a sword (though it was obviously cut in the version I saw on Talking Pictures), which along with the piranhas and some sadistic punishments dished out to the young idealist after he has been sent to a prison camp by the village elders would have delivered the sorts of thrills Hammer audiences came to see. It's a pity, though, that Lee was obviously asked to play the captain as having one shrivelled hand. Nothing ever comes of that plot-wise, and indeed I don't think it was ever mentioned in the script, but obviously it's another one for the Evil Cripple file. Similarly, there are a couple of black pirates in his gang, presumably to help convey the exoticism of the settings, but they never get to speak.

The dullest parts of this film for me were the fight sequences, which I am Just Not That Into - especially an extended blindfolded fight sequence between two of the pirates, which just seemed to go on forever to little effect, and was ultimately only over which of them was going to be allowed to rape one of the village women anyway. In fact, this never happened as a rescue party arrived in time, but it gave an already very boring fight an unpleasantly icky edge. It also seemed to me that a lot of the strategies employed by the pirates were downright stupid, such as attacking the village en masse from the front, rather than sending a small party round the side while the villagers were all busy holding off the main attack; or stopping to sleep in the forest after they have seized the treasure and thus allowing the villagers to catch up with them, rather than just ploughing the hell on through the night to reach their ship and escape. But whether this was 'meant' to appear stupid, as a way of characterising the pirates as a not particularly effective force, or was simply the result of insufficiently careful script-writing, I'm not sure.

Anyway, worth watching overall as part of my general long-term exploration of both Hammer's oeuvre and Christopher Lee's, but I would be surprised if I found myself rushing back to watch it again.