Elementary, my dear Ritchie

Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the world's first superhero with those deductive powers of logic, has been re-imagined as Batman by Guy Ritchie and his producers. Dr Watson is his Robin.

As this seems to have been a successful ploy at the box office, the sequel to the movie can't be far off. But which other ancient sleuths might be dusted down for the teenies, the new decade? Lord Peter Wimsey as Spiderman? Miss Marple as the Silver Surfer? Philip Marlowe as Captain America?

A new sub-genre has been unleashed.

Character building

Acting must be a strange art, if Andy Serkis' experience is anything to go by. He is one of those perfectionist method-acting types who want to leave his all on the screen, by going to extraordinary lengths to get into character.

And what characters! The likes of Gollum, King Kong, Rigaud (from Little Dorrit), Ian Brady, Captain Haddock and Ian Dury are not exactly routine roles. Mr Serkis is a chameleon taken to extremes, not unlike Robert de Niro or Michael Sheen but with more CGI effects.

Sometimes character-playing spills out into real life, which must get intense. I know of one theatre-in-education actor who found himself stuck as Richard III when he played the role 24/7, including taking planes, going on holiday and doing the school run dressed in character. It was as if he had gurned a face that got frozen into place.

The Skype's the limit

Why is buying technology so much of a struggle?

I finally bought a Skype-compatible headset for my computer for about £30, only to discover from a friend a website that sells Mac products cheaply and reliably, including webcam-cum-microphones for Skype in the range £15-25. The comparable product at the shop I visited retailed at about £90.

It's all too complicated, but I may well keep the non-webcam headset for moments when I want to stay incognito in front of the computer.

Strictly come again, Arlene

The reality spin-off season continues, with Strictly Come Dancing Live being staged at The O2 between 4-7 February 2010 (and at nationwide venues between 15 January-21 February 2010).

And guess who's back as one of the judges.

Someone at the Beeb must have eaten humble pie, or else Alesha Dixon was discreetly not available.

Hoochenanny: happy New Year

Whether you braved the freezing temperatures to get crushed in a crowd waiting for those fleeting firework moments, nursed a celebration pint in a pub (without having to pay through the nose for the privilege for entering the premises), negotiated a house party without crashing out or leaving territory-marking evidence, or watched the organised mayhem that is Jools Holland's annual Hootenanny music show, it was inevitable that news items in the morning would report a huge spike in alcohol-related admissions to Accident and Emergency facilities.

The spectacle of ambulances screeching towards hospitals is almost as much of a feature of the New Year as the London Eye, Edinburgh Castle, the Eiffel Tower, the Times Square ball drop, the Kremlin, or Sydney Harbour Bridge.

I'm not sure if drinking culture abroad is so endemic outside the UK: our parochial news suggests that British tourists are feared in certain popular holiday destinations, but I don't know if foreign tabloids cover drinking escapades of their own citizens to the same extent.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Robert Burns wrote Auld Lang Syne, right? Think again. The Scottish bard copied it down from an old bloke he met on his travels.

At least the Ploughman Poet gave credit where credit was due. Unlike the forgetting of inconvenient truths when record labels came to release cover versions of songs like Blue Suede Shoes, I Shot the Sheriff and Tutti Frutti.

The flowing of royalties eventually helped to quench residual, often racial, anger.

A matter of honours

The UK New Year's honours list can sometimes seem to be buggins's turn, but even discounting the promise of a valedictory award, the choice of Queen's Police Medal going to Cressida Dick seems a little insensitive. Ms Dick runs the specialist crime wing at the Met -- so far, so uncontroversial -- but the fatal 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station happened on her watch. Should this matter?

There does not seem to be much consistency in how public officials are treated: some get rewarded with gongs, others get the boot, often dependent on how the media story plays out.

Perhaps the system of awarding honours is at fault. Would a peerage, say, be appropriate for:

• an intelligence officer overseeing a flawed national security issues;
• a City fat cat nursing a huge annual bonus;
• a civil servant caught up exclusively in party political services?

And would whistleblowers be rewarded so handsomely? One even blew the lid off the award-giving process.

Maybe discrete in-house retirement gifts for controversial recipients would be less likely to attract negative media attention.

Sting on a winter's night

What should pop stars do when their white-heat moment of public adoration has gone? If they have genuine musical talent, and aren't manufactured for fame due to their looks and personality, then Sting isn't a bad model to follow.

Pre-Police, Sting was a jobbing musician working in the gaps between musical genres in Wallsend-upon-Tyne. As the front man for The Police and in the immediate post-group period, Sting was a megastar capable of selling out huge venues.

And now? The fame he found in the early 1980s opens doors to follow his own musical path without worrying unduly about chart success.

From the evidence of a BBC One bio-documentary, featuring his new project If on a Winter's Night, Sting has returned to his North-Eastern roots, and still prefers to explore the gaps between pop, rock, jazz, folk, gospel and the rest.

I doubt a 'where are they now' article in 2040 will feature the likes of Joe McElderry, Leon Jackson, and even Leona Lewis on television talking about their forthcoming concert in Durham Cathedral or any other Anglican edifice.

Schadenfreude in Queensland

Every job has its downsides, even the self-declared 'best job in the world': the caretaker post on Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia.

Ben Southall fended off 34,000 other applicants in a worldwide competition to land the six-month Tourism Queensland post. The job description outline in brief: living an adventurer's lifestyle, looking after the island, hosting guests and publicising the results on a blog, all in the name of saying what fantastic place Queensland is to visit. All amazingly jammy for the right kind of person.

Except now, days away from finishing his tour of duty, Ben Southall has been sting by a deadly Irukandji jellyfish spending several days in hospital.

The media love the Schadenfreude of this: the accident brings Mr Southall down to size and makes the audience a little less jealous of his 'jackpot-win' opportunity. Why is this a reasonable inference? The media have only reported on his job when things have gone wrong, for example when he was criticised for having too much of a good time and not blogging enough.

From the beginning of 2010, Mr Southall starts an 18-month stint of promoting Queensland to the world, so the dream is not diminishing. This new chance to shine would seem to be opening a career path for him, globetrotting the world to promote a region: the British Council would welcome him with open arms.

The moral of the tale? Go for the dream if you have the talent, and see what transpires afterwards. There's hope for us all yet.

The People's Will-i-am

Happy 200th birthday, William Gladstone. Apparently the four-times prime minister read over 20,000 books in his lifetime and wrote copiously: a 19th-century polymath.

Flicking over to news from Amazon.com, which has apparently sold something like 500,000 units of the Kinder 2 since its launch. For the first time in history, more e-books were sold in a day than traditional paper-based books: on Christmas Day 2009. A rubicon has been crossed.

And in another corner of the jungle, Jerry Mitchell says that theatre directors watch DVDs of films for their inspiration rather than reading books, or even synopses of books. The result? Loads of new musicals are now adaptations of movies, the latest examples being Billy Elliot, Legally Blonde and Hairspray. Maybe short stories, poems, children's picture books and magazine articles might fit into musical creatives' mind-space for future inspiration?

Our culture is eating itself at warp speed as creative people are too time-poor and/or lazy to seek out fantastic yet unhyped books to adapt or, whisper it, to create something fabulous from scratch (Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber being the exception that proves the rule).

The upside is that any credible author with a great story that gets made into a successful film may be sitting in the first-class carriage of a gravy train heading towards extended shelf-life as a long-running musical.

William Gladstone's legacy as a representative of Victorian culture is in danger of turning into a derivative rap by the Black-Eyed Peas: pop culture for the Stepford generation The great man would be glad he didn't live to see the day.

Do the math, not the polymath: natch.