by Ian Stewart
Sometimes it is a good thing to have obsessions other than politics. There are times when your interests can coincide, and that’s good too, but we all need to have an escape from the world – even an atheist needs his “heart in a heartless world.”
Only a few days to go now comrades, and I am reaching a level of excitement normally only reached at election time, or during the six nations. Soon we will see the results of all that had work for ourselves.
Not a by-election, not a mayoral race nor even one of those exciting composite motions at the TUC, but the imagining of the wilds of Mirkwood. Yes, Mirkwood, across The misty mountains of middle earth, with Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf and thirteen dwarfs, led by Thorin Oakenshield. I really, really cannot wait to see what Peter Jackson has made of this children’s classic.
From December the thirteenth, we will finally get to see if the waiting has been worth it. The production has been fraught with controversy, from Gulliermo del Toro being in, then out, to accusations of animal cruelty, to taking a pretty slim book and expanding it into three full-length feature films.
On top of this, the Conservative New Zealand government drove a horse and cart through workers rights to enable Warner Brothers and New Line to pay actors and extras below scale. From the outside, it has sometimes looked like a production doomed to failure, and what with the anti-union practices and threats, a deserved one at that.
Yet we all watched the Olympics, knowing full well that the companies who built the stadia were engaged in blacklisting health and safety reps, that the founder of the modern games was a proto-fascist who admired and applauded Hitler in 1936. All I will do is cut the films and Jackson a little slack.
