Web Monitor
14:18 UK time, Tuesday, 19 January 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: why glossier remakes fail, the plague of the blue plaque and the next cyberspace.
• that the American version of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ police drama Life on Mars has been quietly cancelled - despite Harvey Keitel's involvement, playing detective Gene Hunt. Mr Stevenson looks at what can go wrong when America remakes UK television:
"The producers of the American version of The Office reportedly said they set out to make 'the exact same series but with 10% more hope.' It simply wouldn't fly to portray the Dunder Miffliners of Scranton, Pa., as sallow zombies drained of prospects and ambition, whereas the dead-end drones of Wernham Hogg's Slough, England, branch looked right at home on British television. The American producers of Life on Mars clearly had a similar formula in mind, but were I to guess at the exact equation I'd gauge it at: 10% more hope, 30% more schmaltz, 50% more glamour, and 700% better production values... It's this want-to-live-in-its-world-ness that the bigger, brassier American Life on Mars never quite pulls off."
• The news that George Orwell's Indian birthplace will be made into a museum has :
"That we tend to fetishize writers' residences is a little odd to begin with. By and large the same fuss doesn't get made over places where artists have lived, and yet you could argue that an artist's surroundings have more bearing on his work. But birthplaces themselves are an even odder subcategory, certainly less interesting, in general, than the houses where writers have actually worked."
Mr McGrath wonders about the future of blue plaques:
"As for their birthplaces, who cares? Nobody is born at home anymore, and who would want to make a literary pilgrimage to a hospital?"
• Science fiction is too often written off as niche literature, even though it actually changes the future - that is, . She points out that it was a sci-fi writer, William Gibson, who first used the word "cyberspace", in 1984, and goes on:
"What will the next 'cyberspace' be, or the next Moon landing, and who will invent it? Science-fiction writers in the year 2050 will be imagining the year 3000, and beyond, and so on. It's a living, breathing tradition that informs the very world it critiques, inventing new myths, words, and realities just as we catch up to its old ones. Our greatest science-fiction writers feed the future with speculation as we move towards it, and we are all better off for considering what they have to say."
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