The Second Coming

A forthcoming drama from Russell T Davies.

'"Steve Baxter is the son of God," says Davies. "The important thing isn't, 'is he or isn't he?', he really is."

"One night Steve realises who he is. He has sort of a revelation. He disappears for 40 days and 40 nights on Saddleworth Moor, comes back and everybody thinks he's mad. No-one believes him, except for one priest who's tracked him down who foresaw the prophecy, you know, all that Omen-type nonsense. So he thinks he's got to prove himself to the world and so goes on the internet, gets together about 100 nutters and gets them to go to Maine Road in Manchester at night and he turns it into day and the whole place goes beserk. There's this big column of daylight in the middle of Manchester all night! Manchester then becomes a Mecca with all these television cameras and live coverage on television. He then makes this big speech to the world which is that there was a First Testament, that wasn't much good, there was a Second Testament, you ignored that, so now there's a Third Testament and you've got to write it and you've got five days because then it's Judgement Day! It's so exciting!"'

Sounds ace, if you ask me. Particularly as the 'Messiah' is apparently heard to complain of the rather nerdy individual whose body he occupies as being rather like 50 megabits downloaded into a pocket-calculator... although the reviewers have been positive, on the whole, about the programme --TL

Also a famous poem by WB Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,    <-- Sometimes quoted as "Myr Tanaqui is loosed upon the world"
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
 
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
In moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indigent desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Kids - just say no to the use of tables for formatting! -- TA

Many, many lines of this poem have been quoted many, many times.

Steve Baxter? Do I sense a really appalling bit of author-community in-jokery here? -- WJR

Also the second album by The Stone Roses; in contrast to their debut album, the characters in Shaun Of The Dead agree it is a suitable weapon to dispatch stumbling zombies, along with anything by Dire Straits. --MF

Category TVSF Category British TVSF