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If you wanted to be charitable, you could say I spent this week doing grown-up, house-hunting assessing-relationship things - or you could just say I spent this week lying on Shim's bed watching Sapphire & Steel. (And occasionally taking a deep breath and closing the laptop and not watching it, especially just before bed.)

I am at a loss to explain why I have suddenly fallen in love with a faintly clunky British sci-fi show from the seventies. Because, okay, I have watched lots of classic Doctor Who and lots of Star Trek TOS. And I love them both - I do love them. I love them because you watch TOS and think, huh, this is pretty derivative. And then you think: no, actually, everything else is derived from this. I mean. I love "Amok Time" and "Mirror, Mirror" and "The City at the Edge of Forever". And I love old Who - I love, love, love that here is this show that people, not just sci-fi fans sort of people, watch, and it's full of warmth and sweetness and oh yeah it's been going since 1963. In both of them, I love the scale of imagination - the way they set out to draw on these huge canvasses, these layered and multi-layered plots (Caves of Androzani, anyone? Does everyone else understand it, or am I not the only one?) and quite often they don't have the budget or technical ability to match, but they have the vision.

But... I'm a child of the nineties. Very sad and unfortunately true. Somehow my suspension of disbelief never quite works out when faced with matte-painting alien worlds and monsters made of bubble-wrap. And I think it's perfectly okay, actually, to love shows not just because they are of great cultural import but also because they are camp and fabulously endearing and sometimes the sets fall over. Red Dwarf would have been no fun at all if they'd not, you know, filmed on Crosby beach in the winter time and invited you to believe it was a tropical paradise.

But Sapphire & Steel is different. It didn't have the money or the technology for alien worlds or monsters, so it didn't have them. Instead it has.... well. It has whole serials against the background of one set, with three or four-member casts, with nearly no specical effects. It's entirely PG-rated. And somehow, through the writing and the acting, it's compelling and it's also seriously fucking scary. I mean. Okay, so in one episode there's some sort of evil presence moving things around. A coat drops off a peg, cushions fall off sofas. One of the characters gives voice what the audience is thinking and says, big deal, what harm can that even do?

Behind him, almost unnoticed, a pillow falls into the baby's crib.

That's it, that's what it does. It has a kind of deathless creepiness that I really, really like. And, okay, one of my issues with really getting into old Who is the veeeeeeery slow pacing. I know it was a serial, it's how it was done, but I just... I flag. And this is the same format, and someone on tvtropes describes Sapphire & Steel as having the pacing of "Star Trek The Motion Picture on thorazine", which is probably true - but it works. It really does work. It builds up the tension and foreboding that way until by the last episode you're properly jumpy.

And couple that with the fact it makes a religion of never telling you what the fuck is going on - who are Sapphire and Steel? Well, they wander the universe fixing stuff that's gone wrong. They are not futuristic detectives, as Amazon apparently thinks they are. They are not Time Lords. They are "medium atomic weights" - but no one ever seems to point out that neither sapphire nor steel is an element. They're telepathic between themselves, but not generally. They don't sleep and they don't age. They're very aware of and tied to time. And, while I'm at it, they're played by David McCallum and Joanna Lumley and it's 1979 and I am so grateful for my own bisexuality sometimes I can't even tell you. I mean. Come on. Just. How is this quantity of preternatural beauty even possible.

And they're not human. I really love how well that's done, too: through a mixture of good writing and acting, you're really made to believe that while they look human, they're not. They're alien and amoral and kind of sinister and the relationship between them definitely consists in something but not something you can understand. It's loving and alien and sexually charged and kinky as all-get-out in a lot of ways - okay, obscure, but even so I was amazed to discover that no has ever written it for kink_bingo.

And, there is a fair bit of fic on the AO3 but no actual Sapphire/Steel, which baffles me. The funny thing is, I wanted to find a fic that gets at this whole kinky-sexually-charged-but-inhuman dynamic - and I didn't find it, but I did find a vid, of all things: Ground Beneath Your Feet (on youtube - couldn't find it anywhere else) and I totally love it and have watched a redacted number of times in the last couple of days. (And me, you know me, I'm vid-illiterate, there's a tiny handful of vids that have had enough of an effect on me for me to watch them more than once.) But it's amazing - gets at all that, the relationship between them, the way-creepy-cool vibe the show has, and gives it some actual pace and as a bonus it's very pretty to look at.

And yes. It's Britain in 1979. Sometimes the haircuts remind you of this fact. Sometimes the interior decor does. But, it impresses me by having a non-white character - Lead, who neatly subverts the stereotypes - and by doing interesting things with gender power dynamics. On first gloss, Steel is the dominant half of the pair... but it's not actually quite that simple. I like it.

On the whole this isn't an unreserved rec - if you're not me, for example, and thus maybe don't have a thing for deserted underground stations and urban ghost stories and understated creepiness and all of those things together, it might not be to your taste, and I should mention again that it can be really very disturbing - but. But, I like it better than old Who. Shush. Don't tell anyone.

The DVDs can be had for not that much, so I was going to get them, but on second thoughts, I think I will wait till the house-move is over and then get them delivered to a new address. It is a little ridiculous how exciitng I find this. Hi I am grown up honest.

Okay, so. I'm too late for More Joy Day, but today I am much more joyful. Have some of the things that are making me joyful:

-Via a lot of people, most recently sebastienne, but, srsly. The estimable Oxford contingent of Thames Valley police have been caught toboganning down Boars Hill on their riot shields. Is it just me or does this go some way to restoring one's faith in humanity?

-Also via a lot of people, festivids is open for business. Now, I am not a vid sort of a person, usually; I mean, I like them, but I lack the vid-watching nous, I think. I tend to watch and then go "oooh, pretty". Yay, profound. But! I have recs anyway.

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Slings & Arrows. Okay. Some amazing person made a Slings & Arrows vid to "Unity Mitford" by the Indelicates. And it wasn't even for me. Like. Someone made a vid of my very favourite obscure Canadian show to an obscure song by one of my favourite obscure British bands. Yay! And, it's a good vid! It really gets Geoffrey, Ellen and Oliver. I like it a lot.

Every Star You Chase, Red Dwarf. Basically, this is, hey, you guys, someone made a vid for Red Dwarf! A funny, silly little vid which is made all the more funny and silly for being made to a mash-up of Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" with "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. I mean. Really.

All For Swinging You Around, Little Mosque on the Prairie. Hey, you guys, someone made a vid for Little Mosque on the Prairie! It's awesome!

(Also, if you have never seen Little Mosque, you should. It's about a small fictional town in Ontario and its Muslim community, and its wider community, and it sounds like it's going to be Serious Social Commentary and then it turns out to be a delightful light comedy with the not-oft-repeated-enough message that hey, brown people are Political and Important but also kind of silly, kind of adorable, kind of pathetic, kind of human too.)

Aaaaand, finally. Past and Present, Chak De! India. You guys. You guys, I keep waaaailing at this vid. In the good way! But I keep watching it, and the perfect rhythmic cuts, and the movement, and the motion, and the women who look like me, and more movement and more motion, and women who look like me being strong and beautiful, and seriously, tears are not the appropriate response to a happy-making vid to a Feist song. And yet. Please watch this, if you don't watch any of the others and you have no idea what Chak De! India even is. It fills with me this stupid, pure, joy.

About Chak De! India. I saw it on a plane one time. I think I need to watch it again. But, in brief, it is a film about the Indian women's hockey team. (What is India's national sport? Clue: it's not cricket, and it starts with F and ends with "-ield hockey".) And that's all wrong as a summary, because it doesn't really get what I love about it, and the vid: it's about women, not changing the world, but changing their bit of it. It also has Shah Rukh Khan in it, but nothing in life is perfect.

-On a similar topic, I was asking a couple of days ago whether there is a Hindu-type equivalent to purimgifts. kismeteve pointed me at purnima_fic. "Purnima" means "full moon", and is in fact the first proper grown-up word I learned to say. (I remember being very proud. Puuuur-neeee-maaa.)

So, anyway, yes, it's a good idea - a general fic community with focus on South Asian characters, and currently running a Holi challenge. I like this idea a lot - Parvati and Padma playing Holi at Hogwarts, anyone? - but I'm sort of thinking an actual gift exchange, like purimgifts or yuletide might be more fun. I don't know; I might wait for Diwali and run it myself. Maybe. Possibly. And it would be Hindu-themed, rather than South Asian-themed, if I did that, but that's not the worst idea ever.

(Re: Holi. Traditionally celebrated in spring, with music, dancing and throwing paint at each other. Never being in India at the appropriate time, I have played it once in my life, during a cold grey Oxford spring. I ended up looking like this.)

Also, speaking of purimgifts, I have more or less decided to sign up. Thank you all for your thoughts on the matter, the other day, especially the people who offered to check for fail, I appreciate it.

Possibly it would be in the spirit of more joy to go and do some work, in the anticipation of joy when there is no work left to be done. This is what I tell myself.