We had never seen a 'proper' ballet before, so we picked Giselle. Previously we'd seen a ballet/dance version of Dracula at the West Yorkshire Playhouse that didn't blow me away, and a modern dance interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Edinburgh, which was intriguing and hot. Giselle conforms more to what I think a ballet is. The closest I've come to such previously would be watching the excellent Black Swan, and the musical Billy Elliott.
Coming off a week of a head cold and sat in an over-warm theatre (the ice cream seller told me that the heat's turned up for the benefit of the dancers) meant that I found my lids drooping on occasion during the first act and so I may not have been in the best condition for judging what I saw. However, I have determined that I don't think ballet is for me. It feels like ballet is a world that you really have to know, that isn't accessible to people like me who dip in with no background knowledge. If I hadn't read the act synopses in the programme beforehand I would not have been able to follow all that was going on, particularly in the second act.
I think I need my drama and plot articulating, either through lines of dialogue or song lyrics, as I find it hard to interpret the mime of ballet. Oh it all looked very pretty and the dancing appeared excellent (though I have no frame of reference to say otherwise) but it all felt a bit like showing off. I thought well fair enough you can dance beautifully, but so what, what does that do to further to story? My emotions weren't stirred as I was either trying to figure out who was who and what they were doing or I was ignorant of what I was supposed to be feeling. The live music, for which the Grand takes out the first 3 rows of stalls and employs a much larger orchestra than normal, was brilliant, and I enjoyed the second act's dancing if not the story. The tale of Giselle - she falls for a nobleman dressed as a peasant (why he's dressed like this is unknown) who is betrothed to another, when she finds out she dies of a broken heart, and then rises from the grave to dance with him, for some reason - is tragic when written down but becomes fairly inconsequential when spun out into over-long dances. I will stick to the drama of Black Swan in future I think.
Being born in 1984 I spent my youngest years growing up in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, but being so young I knew little of this. As I've grown older most of the stuff I hear about Thatcher is overwhelmingly negative - particularly in Gay Times and Attitude which hold her to account for Section 28. Outside of the gay sphere, the Falklands, miners and the poll tax are some of Thatcher's less well remembered legacies. I've been intrigued about what kept her in power from 1979 to 1990 if she was so terrible, and so when browsing in a bookshop one day I came across John Sergeant's book, Maggie. A fan of Sergeant's wit from his stints on Have I Got News For You, I decided to give the book a go, and having just whizzed through it on a week off work full of cold, I've come out quite a bit wiser about Thatcher's fall from grace and her political legacy, if not much more the wiser about her decade long appeal to voters.
Sergeant writes with the same gentle humour and intelligence as he demonstrates on TV (Strictly Come Dancing notwithstanding), and he conveys some very dry and boring seeming political concepts in an understandable and interesting manner - his descriptions of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the internal workings of Conservative party leadership elections could have been snore-fests in lesser hands, but his experience of broadcast news journalism and ability to explain political processes in 30 second sound bites comes in hand. His access to members of then current and previous government ministers, including John Major and Tony Blair, and his presence at many of the events he discusses means that he speaks with authority.
The book discusses the last few years of Thatcher's 'reign' and how she was ousted by her own party, and then how she managed to play a part, however unwittingly, in the downfall of the Conservative party and Major's subsequent government, leading to an appalling result for them at the 1997 election. This 'fatal legecy' Sergeant argues continued within the party in opposition as pro-European and Euro-sceptic factions fell out, causing disunity and distrust by the British public. It is clear that Sergeant holds Thatcher in high regard in terms of the impact and power she held and the influence she continued to have on politics long after she ceased to be PM, but this is no sycophantic treatise, rather it's a skillful, balanced look at how Thatcher and the myth of Maggie came to influence the political landscape of the 1990's and 2000's. A fascinating read that has helped with my political understanding immeasurably.
I found the second season of The Cleveland Show to be funnier and more enjoyable that the first, mostly I think because there was a lack of scatological humour and many more injokes and generally oddness. It's the sort of series you watch and laugh all the way through and then forget what it was about a short while later (maybe that's just me).
This season's most memorable bit that had me laughing and singing it for days later was Cleveland's belligerent father singing 'Your face looks like a butt-crack' to his son, to the tune of We Like To Party. It's not big, it's not clever, but it sure as hell tickled me. So funny was it that rather than talk more about the series, I'll just post this video:
I first sat down to watch the extended pilot episode of ER and a couple of others back when I was at uni. I liked it but for some reason I didn't go back - I watched a lot of CSI and West Wing instead. It's taken me more than a couple of months to watch all of the first season, not because I didn't enjoy it, more for time constraints. The pedigree of Michael Crichton and John Wells (who went on to The West Wing) and the presence of George Clooney made me want to revisit the show, and I also wanted to watch something that wasn't science fiction, crime or very modern.
As the series went on I found ER to be utterly enthralling, and the primary reason is the investment the series and thus I made in the characters. The pulse-pounding, heart-stopping pace of the medical drama was pretty gripping too, with bravura camera work that made you really feel the tension of the life and death drama of an emergency room. Casualty eat your heart out. Noah Wyle's med student John Carter is the viewer's window into this world, and it was good to see him grow and develop his medical knowledge over the series, while grumpy Dr Benton (Eriq La Salle) mellowed, partly as the result of his mother's decline and death. Mark (Anthony Edwards) had marital troubles, and Susan (Sherry Stringfield) had to deal with her irritating leech of a sister. George Clooney's Dr Ross mostly got to be swoonsome and screwed up relationships because of it, and mooned over betrothed Nurse Hathaway (Julianna Margulies) who spent the pilot episode half dead after a suicide attempt.
In lesser hands these storylines could have been trite, but they were skillfully woven into the drama of ER and influenced the doctors' and nurses' professional lives to varying degrees. The many guest stars (including Donna Moss!) had interesting ailments and were occasionally heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious. All of these aspects - the cast, the writing, the direction - all added up to a top notch season of television. At some point I hope to catch up on the next 14 seasons, but that may have to wait a while.
Two TV adaptations of popular books, both very different source material and different results. I was drawn to Dirk Gently (which now serves as a pilot episode as a series has since been commissioned) as it is based on a Douglas Adams book (that I haven't read) and starred Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd - and it turned out Doreen 'Mrs Warboys' Mantle and Helen 'Emily off Friends' Baxendale where in it too. So a cracking cast and pedigree, it's reassuring that the end result was such fun and left me wanting more.
It's a rather whimsical tale of Dirk, a holisitic detective - which basically means he tries to find connections in seemingly unconnected events, and he doesn't believe anything that happens is unconnected to the current mystery, which in this case involved a missing cat... and then took in time travel and a missing millionaire. The story was typically Adams-based left-field stuff that required suspension of disbelief and surrender to the sheer joy of it all. Mangan appeared perfectly cast in the role, he's quickly becoming an actor who draws me to programmes, as he paints over a white board to use again, or hypnotises his friend MacDuff into investing in his agency. The whole confection and the resolution of the mystery was so wonderfully surreal I can't wait to see the series.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, based on a recent bestseller (again, that I haven't read) about the fictionalised account of a true story, was a completely different entity. A one off tale set in the mid 1800s, it tells of Mr Whicher, a detective sent from London to a sleepy country village to investigate the murder of a young child in a country house. Paddy Considine played the titular Mr Whicher with a good dose of suspicion but otherwise didn't leave a great impression, though I feel this was the fault of the script not the actor. It was an interesting story, and Mr Whicher fairly quickly alights on the deceased's step-sister as the killer and proceeds to try and prove how and why she did it. There are no twists and turns or unmaskings of the real suspect - it's made clear she did it, with assistance from her brother who gets away with it - and so that makes a change, although I'm not sure for the better. I was expecting a twist or something particularly dramatic but the whole thing was rather quiet. I liked the film but I found it a bit too straight-forward, although there was interest to be had in seeing the methods of a nineteenth century detective and the legal system.
For the second time this year I've abandoned a book after getting 100 pages in. While Taltos was uninvolving and lacking in incident, Coline Forbes' The Cauldron was fairly action packed and had a story that almost made me keep going. What made me give up was the barely believable characters and the appallingly over-written dialogue and action. It was like reading something that has been badly mistranslated from a different language. Plot developments were signposted several times in advance, to the shock of the characters - who were supposed to be a crack squad of spies but were puzzled as to why lead agent Paula Grey could find a female washed up in California and then an identical woman 2 weeks later dies in the sea in Cornwall. 100 pages it takes before they realise they've got twins on their hands! And this is a crack team!
I just couldn't take the wooden dialogue, poorly thought out characters and general bad writing anymore and gave up - this was all distracting me from the plot, which was actually quite intriguing. I'm surprised by the blurb about the author that says he earns his living solely from writing and this is his twenty-third novel, in 1997. I dread to think how many he's churned out since then. I will not be seeking out Colin Forbes in future.
Filmed at Leeds' Kirkstall Abbey on 19th March, the night I was at Calendar Girls, and broadcast live on BBC3, Frankenstein's Wedding was a curious beast. I know several friends from different 'groups' who went along to be part of the audience on the night, and I would've gone too if I could, but having just got round to watching it now I'm sure I made the right choice.
A bit of a Frankenstein's monster itself, the show (was it a film at 90 mins? a theatrical play? a TV programme?) roughly updated Mary Shelley's original story to a modern setting and has events take place at Victor Frankenstein's wedding to Elizabeth at Kirkstall Abbey - the audience are playing 'wedding guests' and Reggie Yates introduces the whole thing to begin with and then disappears. So it's not like the characters know they are being filmed. The ceremony takes place in the Abbey itself and then the reception is on a massive stage, where there is a band and throughout the show there are musical numbers, like I Gotta Feeling and stuff by Athlete, sung as part of the wedding entertainment, or not... as Victor sang something while murdering the female monster he'd created in his lab in a room just off the Abbey...
The cast included 'im off the Fast Show, 'er off Eastenders, 'im off Emmerdale, 'er off As If, and 'im off At Home With the Braithwaites, and they were all very good. Any fluffs were down to technical work, wobbly cameramen and the like. I think it all would have worked better if the audience hadn't been there, and the performance had been live and filmed around the Abbey, but with a more theatrical feel. Fewer pantomime elements perhaps. As far as I could tell the massive throng of audience watched most of the action on screens anyway, as only about 20 minutes were staged directly on the stage in front of them, so watching on TV was probably the best way to see it. This was an interesting experiment then, but one that didn't really add up to the sum of its (body) parts.
