Seen and heard: April to June 2020

The Stanley Parable – curious and amusing novelty adventure game. There are essentially only two characters: Stanley, played by you in first person view, and the narrator of the game. The game concept is a tension or struggle between you / Stanley and the narrator. Very near the start, for example, you / Stanley are confronted by two doors and the narrator says that Stanley went through the door on the left. Do you do what the narrator says or the opposite? Each leads to different consequences. As you / Stanley walk through his deserted office building, the narrator describes what Stanley is doing and thinking - trying to manipulate you? - and eventually addresses Stanley directly, reasoning, pleading or threatening. In one ending of the game, Stanley escapes from his bureaucratic nightmare building and emerges into open green countryside (like The Truman Show, or Brazil), but there are at least 14 other endings to the game, all very different and some completely surreal. This is a meta-game: a game which plays with the idea of a game, and what it is to play a game. A fun idea, well and throughly implemented.

Appalled Graphic Designer Shows Girls’ Life Magazine What Their Cover Should Look Like – extraordinary illustrations, showing the original Girls' Life magazine cover, with features like 'Fall fashion you'll love: 100+ ways to SLAY on the first day' and 'Your dream hair', and the re-designed cover replacing these with 'Girls doing good: 100+ ways to help others in your community' and 'Your dream career'. If you think that's over the top, look at what boys were getting in the corresponding Boy's Life magazine. ('Explore your future: Astronaut? Artist? Firefighter?Chef? Here's how to be what you want to be.') And I thought this kind of ambition-limiting gender stereotyping had quite gone away.

Ghost Trick – replaying this great puzzle adventure game, I once again enjoyed the vivid characters (especially the ultra-camp white-suited Inspector Cabanela), the tricky but not too tricky puzzles with a well-paced expansion of the game mechanic, and the fantastic but powerfully compelling storyline. And I marvelled again at how effectively the changes in mood and pace are conveyed through sound stings, graphic effects, and above all the music.

Foyle’s War – This seemed like the box set to rewatch during Covid-19 lockdown: a study in how different people respond to extraordinary changed and frequently desperate times, some with courage and nobility, some with greed and selfishness, and most with ordinary human frailty. Hardly any of the crimes and murders featured are really about the war, which is only the setting for the stories.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – More great lockdown box set rewatching, and an antidote to the dreadful film version which ruined the story by making it heroic instead of sleazy and spelling out everything explicitly. I remember how the original TV transmision gripped the country, despite – or because of – the fact that noone could understand it. I suppose you couldn't do TV like that now. The BBC's Radio Times had a cartoon on the letters page, where people had been complaining that it was too hard: on the set, one programme maker was saying to another 'Of course, we have to consider less sophisticated viewers,' while in front of the camera an actor was pointing to a large sign around his neck reading 'THE MOLE'. That's what the film was like.  

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – nice but predictable film about an author just after the Second World War investigating events during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.

Lockdown performance videos. Of all the great videos featuring isolated and invidually-recording performers, my favourites are: I Am Cow, sung by Peculi8;Let's Face the Music and Dance, performed by Down for the Count; The Liar Tweets Tonight, performed by Roy Zimmerman and the ReZisters; Libera nos, sung by The Sixteen; All in the Same Dance, with multiple dancers and music by Mauro Durante.

The Queen’s broadcasts for the Covid-19 outbreak and the 75th anniversary of VE Day – I reckon these are the best broadcasts she's ever done; she seems to be taking on a new role as the grandmother of the nation. 

A virtual prayer walk – since we can't get to Turvey Abbey during lockdown, we can at least do this virtual walking meditation around its grounds. Thank you, Sister Miriam. 

Grayson’s Art Club – A great show from the rapidly-becoming national treature Grayson Perry, produced during lockdown so featuring video calls with non-artist celebrities and members of the public who've sent in art. It's great to see him with his psychotherapist wife Philippa too; what a lovely couple they make. (Others think so too.)

A House Through Time, series 3 – Another great series from David Olusoga, this time featuring a Bristol house built by a slave-trading sea captain - which proved unexpectedly topical when Bristol race rights protesters pulled down the statue of slave trader (and philanthropist) Edward Colston and pushed it into the harbour, thus achieving in one afternoon what several years of lobbying and negotiation had failed to do.

Heaven Knows Mr Allison – Lovely classic odd couple film, with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum as a nun and a US marine stranded together on a Pacific island in Japanese territory during the Second World War, and in their struggle to survive coming to a grudging mutual respect, and possibly more.

Black Books, Season 1 – A welcome repeat of this wonderful, surreal and emotional TV comedy.

Mirages of Winter – Meditative adventure game, in which you move slowly through a series of hand-painted Chinese-style scenes, as a fisherman passes the time through winter and into Spring. A game to savour and take time over, so the only bad parts are where you get stuck working out how to advance the story and start jabbing at everything in frustration, which dispels the mood. Better, as I did a couple of times, to put it down and return later, when another idea or possibility may arise. But I still needed to refer to a video walkthrough on several more occasions, having to listen to the player repeatedly saying, with increasing anger, "I don't know what I'm doing."

Whispers of a Machine – Much-awarded adventure game (for example here and here), and deservedly so. Sort of Scandi-cyberpunk-noir, with recently-qualified agent Vera Englund investigating murders in a remote northern European town. The neat gimmick is that she has cybernetic implants which enhance her investigative abilities – for example, being able to see microscopic biological residue or to detect changed vital signs when someone is lying. Which enhancements you get depends on how you play Vera: analytic, empathetic or assertive. Very good voice acting, and an interesting setting in a post-AI-apocalypse world, although the reviewer is right that the ending somehow lacks the energy which drove the story forward up till then. Vera is a tremendous character, though, who I'd be very happy to see return. 

The Salisbury Poisonings – Scary three-part drama, reconstructing the events of 2018 when a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with nerve agent in central Salisbury, leading to a major public health emergency. Very interesting to watch now, and to see how promptly the Wiltshire Director of Public Health acted to isolate potentially contaminated areas and to track down people who might have come into contact with them – undoubtedly saving many lives; what a contrast with our governments lackadaisical attitude when Covid-19 arrived on these shores. Compelling performance from Anne Marie Duff as Tracy Daszkiewicz, the DPH, and some standout scenes – especially for me the painful public meeting at which she gets a roasting, because the people want facts and reassurance at a time when very little is known for sure. It culminates in one person asking her to answer "one simple question": “is Salisbury safe?” – and the scene ends right there, without showing her actual answer, thus leaving us with the awful realisation that there could be no good answer to such a question.

The Encounter – ingenious and powerful Complicité one-man show (well, one man on stage supported by some pretty amazing sound engineers) telling the story of Loren McIntyre, a photographer from National Geographic, who in 1969 got lost amongst the people of the remote Javari Valley in Brazil. Extraordinary use of multi-layered sound and great acting from Simon McBurney to conjure up powerful scenes in the imagination. (See also post-show Q&A and a video about the production.)

Star Trek 25th Anniversary (game) – I remember excitedly reading a review of this back in 1994 in the then cutting-edge magazine CD-ROM Today and lamenting my lack of a PC to play it on. Finding it at a bargain price on GOG (which stands for Good Old Games – they've done a great service in making old games available in forms which will run on today's machines), and seeing that player reviews were still good, I had a go – and was bitterly disappointed. The problem isn't the VGA graphics (which it's quite stylish to imitate, these days), or even the voice acting by the original TV cast, which was a bonus on the CD-ROM version (William Shatner is particularly poor), or the writing (which is okay, and does capture something of the feel of the original series). It's the interface which makes playing the game a continual frustration, penalising experimentation by bringing up a "nothing to see here" sound clip for each misplaced click (of which there are necessarily many, because there's a lot of pixel hunting involved), and generally never requiring just one click of the player when it can demand three. I gave up before the end of the first mission. I'd rather watch the old episodes on DVD instead.

The School that tried to End Racism – documentary following a brave, interesting attempt by one South London school to put racial awareness on the curriculum. Some dubious activities and an annoying American (very American) guru, but the kids themselves were great and game, and their authentic responses were riveting. Some standout moments for me: when the kids were told to divide into white and black / minority ethnic groups, and a mixed race girl didn’t know which one to join; the Japanese girl, who when they were asked to show something representing their culture produced the calligraphy with which she’d graduated from Japanese school; the South and East Asian kids who insisted on forming a third group because they didn’t feel they had much in common with the black kids; and the black kid who came home from school and told his (black) mother about what he’d said about the experience of having his bag searched in a shop because the shopkeeper thought that black kids were more likely to steal, to have his mother defend the reasonableness of the shopkeeper’s action and he (who’d been taught about internalised oppression) eventually, and in evident conflict and distress, saying “I don’t agree.” The kids showed how there are no easy solutions to racism, only difficult and painful ones; and that it’s not all black and white.