Peter Pan – pantomime at Milton Keynes Theatre. Definitely the best panto in our grand-daughter’s four years of panto-going. At her first panto it was clear that most of the budget had been spent on a 3D film insert (that was back when 3D was all the rage), leaving not so much for costumes and sets, or even a decent script. This year they’d spent the budget much more wisely: on music rights (so every song was a hit), and on a good cast, including streetdance company Flawless (who did an astonishing dance-in-the-dark, only their body outlines visible picked out with flashing LED lights, worth the price of admission on its own) and a tremendous sulky Tinkerbell (the dwarf Francesca Mills, working on roller skates as well as wires).
Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action - DVD in our grand-daughter's Christmas bundle, of which most of the presents on her wishlist were Monster High branded, this being apparently what the smart seven-year olds are into these days. The Monster High series is set amongst the girls at an American west coast high school (boys can be referred to as "cute" but that's the extent of the sexual involvement), with the twist that all the characters are various kinds of horror film monster. There's a lot of wordplay, so for example this movie-themed episode refers to Hauntlywood instead of Hollywood, but unlike, say, Scooby Doo, no actual horror or scares; girl relationships and rivalries are the things which are important. It's quite well-written and a great deal better than it sounds, but I don't think I'll be checking out any further episodes on my own account.
Carols from King's 1954 - a remastered transmission of the very first of the annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the year after the Coronation, usually taken as the tipping point in mass TV ownership and a landmark in event broadcasting. Interesting to see what hasn't changed (the choir, under Boris Ord, and the readings sounded pretty much the same - I'd expected the accents to be plummier) and what has. Camera positions were very limited of course, but so was the sound; they seemed to have miked the choir and the lectern, but they had great difficulty balancing the organ, so wisely most of the carols were a capella.
Sorcery 2 - very smooth and attractive app-conversion of Steve Jackson's 1984 gamebook. I've previously praised Sorcery 1 (see also the Adventure Gamers review), and this second part is even better, with a much more complex narrative including go-back-in-time loops to allow you to take other pathways (almost certainly necessary to find everything you need to complete the game). If anyone still believes a multiple-choice gamebook format means trivial problems because the solution has to be listed amongst the options, they should look at the players’ appeals for help at the bottom of this page. The engine behind Sorcery (and the well-reviewed 80 Days) is available in cut-down form as the Inklewriter, which I’m investigating (along with Undum) as another possible engine for a web-conversion of my 1987 game Bestiary, since it has a nicer and more contemporary look than Quest. (Varytale alas is no longer supported.)
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince - a much-respected book, intended for screenplay authors moving into the games industry, but full of insight into the working of large-scale games development (maybe 100 people on the team for an AAA game). Of particular interest to me, from the point of view of explaining learning materials development to academics, were: (1) the role of the games designer, not to be confused with a graphic designer, who holds the vision of the gameplay on which the game will stand or fall (learning design plays an analogous role in learning materials development, though a learning designer doesn't have seniority over academic authors who it's assumed are normally their own learning designers); and (2) the advice to screenplay writers that "a game is not a film", meaning that what happens, and in what order, is as much dependent on the player as the game-makers (the analogous advice for academic authors would be that "learning materials are not textbooks", to counter their tendency to write didactic presentation first and treat learning activities as an add-on).
The Boston Record, CD of live concert by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension - a welcome birthday present, though I can't now recall when or why I added it to my wishlist, as the name carries no associations for me. I must have seen a review and checked it out online. My playlist is now enhanced by their super-energetic guitar-led jazz rock; it's the sound of my generation.
"Sparks will fly: How to hack your home", Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People - this year given by a lively young woman named Danielle George, who turned out to be a professor of Engineering at Manchester. Quite a change from George Porter's lectures in my own childhood, and I don't just mean the age and gender of the lecturer. Where George Porter would teach the science and then do a demonstration (which might well be fun and cool), Danielle George started with the fun and cool demonstration and then explained what was going on. Also, characteristically for an engineer, she repeatedly referred to the practical work as "tinkering" or more especially "hacking" - shorn of its criminal and pejorative overtones to mean simply opening up a device and making it do something other than what it was originally built to do. This is the pedagogy of experiential learning applied in the lecture hall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" - from a box set of Series 3, part of a Christmas present to complete my collection. This was the episode I chose to watch first, not only because it's a good one but because it's now regarded as a turning point in the entire Star Trek opus. The original series was full of Sixties idealism, portraying a future free of racial and social conflicts, with humanity at peace and able to devote its resources to science and exploration. There were a few threats to this happy world, in the form of the Klingons and the Romulans and so forth, but on the whole the original series showed an optimistic vision of human progress, and this was continued into the first seasons of The Next Generation. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” suggested for the first time that progress was not inevitable, by showing an alternative timeline in which the Federation was engaged in a damaging decades-long war with the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise was a warship, fighting desperately for its survival. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the move away from the optimistic vision one stage further, portraying the protagonists' harmonious relationships as fragile things which needed to be built and sustained, constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the chaotic universe. If TNG gave us Bajor (part occupied Palestine, part occupied France), then DS9 gave us the Maquis (the Federation rebels who took up arms in rejection of the peace treaty with the Cardassians, taking their name from the guerilla fighters of the French resistance), and ultimately Section 31, Starfleet’s secret black operations division, which drove a coach and horses through the moral certainties of the original series with the claim that it was only their own unspeakable activities that allow Federation idealists to sleep safe in their beds. Say what you like about Star Trek: its vision of the future has certainly moved with the times.
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