Oh dear. Pre-made costumes for a 'click and buy' generation. Convenient  or cash-in?

World Book Day is almost upon us - and once again on the 1st of March, book-loving kids all over the country (except, weirdly, those at C's school) will dress up as their favourite literary characters.

Or at least that's what's supposed to happen. You see World Book Day seems to have become yet another source of stress and annoyance for many parents, and just as many kids too.

Every year it feels like the pressure is on to come up with a costume that isn't just some shop-bought piece of tat (like the header image above, a merciless cash-in branded with the WBD ident and logo. I wonder how much Dave's topslice of the revenue from these is?)

Most of the stress at home comes from the element of competition schools introduce with World Book Day - and that bizarre 'middle-class-parent' struggle to come to school in a costume that looks like you've roped in a Hollywood Wardrobe Designer to design and build an eerily accurate rendition of a character cossie from a book.

Though C's school doesn't actually celebrate or support the day itself (and it seems a lot of schools do their own thing at other times of the year - just like C's school) there are still the inevitable times when we're called on to design a costume, make the durned thing (with my wife normally doing the bulk of the hard work - I just contribute the 'fancy bits' sometimes, as I can't sew to save my life) and then send C to school in something that most teachers and kids will scratch their heads at, and ask "Who are you meant to be?"

Quite often it's made worse by our school's bizarre choice of 'themes' for their own book week. Normally they seem to default to stuff like "Dress as someone from a Roald Dahl book" (easy enough, 'Girl from "The Magic Finger" it is then!) or someone from Alice in Wonderland...but...well...

You see, we're subversives - and as such we always look for the 'non mainstream' approach when it comes to Book Day / week costumes.

To date, C has gone to school dressed as the girl from "Pirate Girl" by Cornelia Funke. She's gone as Laura Ingalls Wilder from the "Little House on the Prairie" novels. She went as a huge and rather complex flower design meant to be one of the living flowers from Alice in Wonderland (because virtually ALL the other girls in her class just stuck a blue dress and Alice band on and went as Alice herself instead). All our costumes have been home made, probably taken longer than we'd liked but it felt more like we were entering into the spirit of world book day - to celebrate the joy of reading and have a bit of fun making a costume that didn't suck.

Anyway, back to that header image and the thought that World Book Day has become yet another celebratory day hijacked by mass consumerism.

If you think the Walliams costumes were bad, here's H & M's attempt to provide ready made costumes...

Crikey, talk about a lazy pass...

Obviously we do not have any problem at all with the prospect of comic characters being legit WBD characters / costumes but the above just shows what a rubbish and lazy pass big companies are capable of when they're trying to tap into the passion and imagination that *should* surround this day.

It does at least give most parents a ready made and 'easy' alternative (honestly though, can you really be as cheeky as to dress your girls up in Disney Princess costumes because "Snow White was a book once, right?").

Still our question remains though - what do you think World Book Day is about? What should it be about? Why does it often feel like books, a celebration of creativity and the essence of why we encourage our kids to read for pleasure is completely and utterly lost somehow? Admittedly this may be our own experience and ours alone. We look on in envy every WBD at some of the things that happen in other people's schools and wonder why not ours. But I'm sure we can't be the only ones thoroughly jaded with the whole thing? For book bloggers that feels a bit...strange really. We should be looking forward to it every year, not dreading it.

Sometimes it feels like WBD is now destined to become as tacky and over-commercialised as Halloween - a day that (I swear to god) would not have become the sh*t-show it has over here if it wasn't for the movie "E.T The Extra Terrestrial"?

We do at least get some cracking mini book editions going out on WBD which definitely make the day worthwhile from a reader perspective. But this biz about the costumes really can take the shine off things big time.

Let's hope this year's is a huge success but let's see less of the profiteering, more of the celebration of reading and fantastic kids books this year, eh?

The subject of this week's ReadItTorial is a bit of a cheeky excuse for talking about a Netflix show that has literally blown my Twitter and Facebook feeds apart over the last month or so, and impressed the socks off me. Since it kicked off in mid-July, "Stranger Things" has been one heck of a hot topic. There may be mild spoilers ahead so if you haven't already watched this, trip carefully my fellow fiends.

"You've GOT to watch this!" everyone kept telling me, screaming at me in fact. I'm usually fiercely cynical about getting drawn into US TV shows. There's just too much faffing around trying to keep track of the various streaming services you need to subscribe to in order to keep up with the good stuff, and though we pay for Netflix, I've swiftly realised that it sucks for pretty much everything except hoary old TV shows, movies you'd watch but never buy (with a smattering of true classics) and of course the Netflix originals.

Which is OK because "Stranger Things" is a Netflix Original Series, and one that taps right squarely into my 80s childhood / teenage years, mixing together Stephen King novels (which I read to DEATH back then - see this IS vaguely book-related!), classic movies (particularly classic amazing 'ensemble' stuff like ET, The Goonies, Flight of the Navigator and IT as well as many, many others) and fusing that all with one of the best character casts I've seen in a dog's age. Last but not least the whole thing is underpinned by awesome synthy John Carpenter-esque music, and a bucketload of 80s classics to boot.



Why does this show work for so many people? Even people who were born way after the catchment period?

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. In fact nostalgia is pretty much saving the movie and TV industry and in some ways it's a fantastic time to be into genre stuff. In other ways it's absolutely killing me to hear Hollywood really scraping the barrel with some of the things they're trying to revive or reboot from that era (do we REALLY need a Splash reboot? And while we're on the subject, why is it OK to swap genders for a movie like Ghostbusters but not OK to flip things around and do the same for Splash?)

We need to see more original stuff breaking through in the movies and on TV. There are so, so many books and story sources that would be better suited to being someone's next highly financed pet project than just taking something someone else did 30 years ago and trying to bring it up to scratch for a modern millennial audience. Most of the modern movies and franchises that HAVE successfully been launched off the back of new or YA novels are great (Hunger Games, The Martian, Harry Potter even) so why not do more of the same?

Sometimes, of course,  the results are a roaring success - particularly when something crosses both boxes off, hitting the nostalgia button but also pressing the 'original' button too.

There's no doubt that Stranger Things isn't purely successful just because it coaxes us into reliving our misspent youth nor because it perfectly recreates a glorious mock-version of movies and shows we watched again and again and again in our formative years. The cast is phenomenally good, those kids can act their socks off and the adults in the cast are damned good too (Winona Ryder, I do still have such a massive crush on you, I always have ever since Heathers!) Hopper is also awesome, in fact he really needs more hero worship. He's the epitome of the perfect Snake Plissken-esque anti-hero, flawed but with his heart in the right place.

What I really loved about it though was the story it told. A story trope that has been used many times on TV and in movies and has always drawn me in, the idea that the happy go-lucky colourful world we live in has a darker twin (in Stranger Things it's referred to as "The Upside Down" by the show's (arguably) most fantastic character, Elle (Eleven) - a little girl with telekinetic powers who has inspired so much amazing fan art over the last few weeks, and rightly so!)

The dark universe in "Stranger Things" instantly puts you on the back foot. It's not just a place where people are a bit mean and wear a goatee beard (Sorry, been watching "Mirror, Mirror" again as the original Star Trek series has also popped up on Netflix and is utterly addictive as ever), it's a horrible place where a bloodthirsty creature holds reign, occasionally leeching into our world and abducting and scoffing down kids and becoming the thread that's inevitably going to lead us into series 2).

Back to the topic at hand. Why does nostalgia have such a huge effect on us? We love the thought that we can trade off reminiscences with our fellow humans. "I remember that!" is the precursor to a shared experience of emotions and feelings, of life experiences that make for amazing stories. There really is something warm and comforting about knowing others were going through the same things you were at the same age, but there's also a lot of satisfaction when a particular instance of reminiscence makes you and your fellow human come away with something completely different too.

For me, this series is like discovering a long lost favourite toy tucked away at the back of the attic, or an old band T-shirt that somehow still fits over my rapidly expanding midriff (mostly because I used to buy colossal T shirts back then).

It's by no means perfect. I hated the way the show treated Barb. Swap the genders and Barb was me as a teen, always the one sitting outside on the porch at parties nursing a warm cup of woodpecker cider waiting for the cool kids to get over (or off with) themselves, the eternal designated driver. I thought she was disposed of way too quickly.
For that matter, Nancy wasn't treated that well either but at least got her moment in the sun later on in the series as she stopped simpering and started kicking arse.

With all that said, I cannot wait for series 2 (and that's the sad thing, even series on a relatively fast track on Netflix seem to take AGES to appear once renewed) but if you really do want an answer to the question posed in the header? The 80s rocked. It was cheesy, the fashions were terrible, the hairstyles were atrocities, but the culture, the music, the movies and just about everything else really can't be beat. Whenever I get the chance to think about what life was back like then, I grab the opportunity with both hands so it's really no surprise I'm digging into "Stranger Things" to watch the entire series all over again. It really is that good.