Seen and heard: July 2015

This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Trouble Life of the BBC – book by Charlotte Higgins. A journalist’s touch makes this an easy but illuminating read, moving seamlessly between historical account and perennial broadcasting issues. How far-sighted of Alan Rusbridger (then Editor of The Guardian) to assign her to work on this book, now paying dividends for the wider context it provides as the renegotiation of the BBC Charter – with potentially radical changes to the BBC’s scope and mission – kicks off in earnest.

Mr Holmes – new film, with Ian McKellen, excellent of course, playing Sherlock Holmes convincingly at three different ages or stages: old, very old but healthy, and very old and ill. Great concept: the long-retired Holmes, keeping bees in the Sussex Downs, struggling to remember his last case which was the reason he gave up detection, with the audience invited to solve the mystery – both intellectual and emotional – along with him as detail after detail successively becomes clear. A lovely tale, another great piece of work from BBC Films.

Gloucester Cathedral – a great place to spend a day, wandering along the side aisles and through the quire (sic) and lady chapel (one of the biggest I’ve seen) and around the cloister court, stopping off for the occasional history lesson from the excellent walk-around guide leaflet or for lunch in the café or for souvenir hunting in the shop. Very nice to see so many contemporary statues in the gothic niches, as some kind of replacement for those destroyed at the Reformation.

Eric Whitacre singers with Laura Mvula – performing in Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Cheltenham Festival, with the bonus that we also got hear them rehearse in the afternoon. The Eric Whitacre sound – all the standards, from 'Lux Aurumque' to 'Sleep', wonderful in the resonant acoustic – segued beautifully with Renaissance Polyphony (Dufay’s 'Ave maris stella') and the harmonic backing to three Mvula numbers (which we’ve told them they should record). Well worth the journey, well worth the price of admission.

The Blackwell Deception – fourth adventure game in the Blackwell sequence created by Dave Gilbert. Extraordinary how the basic story premise – a New York medium and her private eye spirit guide find unhappy spirits and help them to move on – has been spun through so many variations and taken to such depths.

Inside Out – very smart new film from Pixar, dramatising the inner emotional life of an eleven-year -old girl. Actually it cheats in a way: whereas Anger, Fear and Disgust and to a lesser extent Sadness are pure emotions and act only according to their type, Joy is actually a rounded character in her own right. She has her hang-ups (an obsession with giving her girl a “perfect day”) and her own inner emotions (fear and panic when events slip out of her control, contempt for Sadness when she is too depressed to continue), and goes on her own emotional journey as she comes to realise that life isn’t all about her. (For me, the beautiful smile which Sadness gives when Joy finally acknowledges and accepts her is the culmination of the film.) A nice article by OU academic Emma Jones points out how the film reflects the rehabilitation of the emotions in our conception of human nature: not so long ago, such a film would have shown cognitive reason in charge of the mental headquarters, with the emotions relegated to a cupboard.