Chernobyl (2019)

Sam and I watched this when it originally came out in 2019, but reading through Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 has tickled my longstanding interest in Russian culture and so I decided to rewatch the HBO Chernobyl miniseries again.

I’m not going to comment on whether the miniseries is an accurate representation of Russian culture. Anyway, the programme is still very good.

Now, I did think that the whole “the core purpose of the Soviet Union was to lie and shift around blame” stuff was a little heavyhanded. Maybe not totally off-base, but I don't need to be hammered over the head with it. The part where Shcherbina shows up and immediately Bryukhanov is like, “Here’s a list of the people responsible!” is fun and upsetting; but it’s also the capstone on maybe 4 or 5 scenes where his only lines are, “I’m definitely not to blame for this.” And the whole What is the cost of lies? bit that bookends the series lays it on thickly. I've just watched 5 episodes about the cost of lies, I know what the cost of lies is. Hey guys, did you know that lies and coverups were endemic in Soviet political culture? Wow!

Where the show ✨ shines ✨ is in its atmosphere. Oooh yeah give me more of those abstract patterns on wallpaper, on plush drapery, on shabby linoleum. I need more of those big Soviet mosaics, more poured concrete flowerboxes, more bare pipework in khruschyovka hallways. More painted iron doors with stencilled Cyrillic text on it. The stuffy rubberised liquidator suits. Those roughed-up plastic slides that Legasov uses during the trial to visualise nuclear activity inside of the core. The tiles inside of Moscow Hospital No. 6. The plastic curtains and pus-stained pillows. The big diesel trucks, the polyester suits, the drinking glasses and enamelware cups clinking against bottles of vodka. The fonts they used for the titles!

If it weren’t y’know in the midst of a total economic and political meltdown, I would have loved to live in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. To sit in my cramped kitchen reading state-approved literature. To wear sweater-vests and thick Bakelite eyeglasses. Like from a purely aesthetic point of view. I guess that’s why they keep putting Chernobyl in video games. It tickles the same itch for me as Miyazaki movies: a world I want to sink my fingers into and squeeze until my knuckles split.

I should move to Stevenage.

Good fun. I can tell that my teenage self would have eaten this stuff up. Some characters were a little overacted but on the whole solid. Only a little bit of trimming from the book, nothing too egregious—although I would have liked to see more from Waterloo. But overall the pace felt better in the show than in the book.

Some really strange editing choice as well, especially in the later episodes. Hard cuts, jarring stuff. The editors don't seem to know quite how to end an episode; the credits always just sort of leap up out of nowhere. Maybe the producers were expecting that people would watch this as like a box set without interstitial credits or something.

This year is quickly turning into a series of weekends where I do fun stuff and weekdays where I sit around and try to stay on top of everything else.

We spent the better part of our free time during the week watching Severance, which puts us in the one-half of the world who only started watching after Apple did a big marketing offensive, including a weird bit where Tim Cook pretends to have been severed and stares blankly into the middle distance, as if he’s not one of the wax figurines in the Perpetuity Wing. I really like Severance. I like shows where the audience gets to hold a bunch of narrative strands together and work to remember which characters know what. And they told me that I wouldn’t need to remember what dramatic irony is!

I also started listening to a new podcast called “Never Post” (should podcasts be quoted, or italicised?); it’s “about the internet”, which is what it feels like maybe 1 in 3 new podcasts in 2024 is about. Anyway this week’s episode about Cameo (the App) and some navel-gazing about cameras but had this interval in the middle about TikTok going down for like three hours that gave me chills. I try not to get involved in moral panics but listening to all these young folks being like, “keep scrolling—don’t eat don’t sleep just keep scrolling,” and “I refuse to read my posts—I’m not going to rewire my brain to read,” spooked me pretty bad. Lots of pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net good, and a few pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net bad—and for my part I think about TikTok nearly not at all—but I’m the teensiest bit concerned that shortform video seems to have replaced media as a monolith for a whole demographic cohort, and that this demographic cohort is about to inherit the earth while I continue to lose relevance. Ehhhhh

At the weekend I replaced the spark plugs in the Skoda in the hope that it would resolve our dwindling fuel economy woes (ChatGPT told me to—how’s that for a moral panic!). It didn’t. But I did find that the outgoing spark plugs were wildly overgapped, so I must have fixed something, right? Anyway ChatGPT says that the next thing I need to learn to replace are the O2 sensors pre- and post-catalytic converter.

Then on Sunday we dropped in to Durham to buy a pair of road running (!) shoes ahead of the Boston Marathon (not that one) in April. I’ve never had a pair of road shoes but I’m keen to see how I get on.

Then we went up to South Shields for the Temple Park cross-country running fixture. It was a really lovely day and not too tough going. There were a couple of steeplechase-style puddles to splodge through, which roused the spirit and got me good and clarty, and maybe even got some dirt in my competitors’ eyes. Finally breaking my Dry January Alcoholic Fast the night before probably didn’t do me any favours, but I finished in decent time.

Very few pictures this week; I should have taken pictures at Temple Park or while changing the spark plugs—but I didn’t!