Hero U: Rogue to Redemption – ingenious and well-reviewed dungeons-and-dragons-type RPG, but also a simulation of university life, so I just had to try it didn’t I. You play a teenage thief, who is mysteriously enrolled in the Hero University, where he studies how to be a "rogue" (basically, a thief with morals) alongside several other misfits too unskilled to be Warriors, not clever or magical enough to be Wizards, not good enough to be Paladins, and lacking the musical or acting talent to become Bards. As well as attending classes, with regular tests, you have to negotiate relationships with your classmates (the upper class snob, the swot, the feisty girl etc), who you can choose to help with their personal quests or not, as well as pursuing your own journey, while making money to buy better equipment and clothing by washing dishes, catching rats in the wine cellars, or looting chests in the haunted catacombs. I was really quite sorry to say goodbye to my friends at the end of term - the sign of a good game.
Strictly Come Dancing – we wondered how it could ever happen this year, since any form of ballroom dancing would seem to be ruled out by social distancing. But the BBC found a way, and a lot of people made a lot of sacrifices (couples formed social bubbles, not meeting their families at all while they were in the show), and how grateful we all were for the result. Standout moment for me was 55-year-old Bill Bailey’s hip-hop number with Oti Mabuse. Knowing him as a comedian, we all expected him to be the joke contestant: entertaining, but not dancing very well. But when Bill decides to learn something, he learns it properly - as shown by his demonstration on Graham Norton of his mandola-playing skills learned during lockdown. A deserving winner of the 2020 season: not the best dancer in the final, but the most inspiring.
Roadkill – BBC TV drama series by David Hare. Hugh Laurie was naturally excellent and magnetic in the lead role, but the whole never seemed to come together, one problem being the (deliberately?) different genre of each episode. If one is conspiracy thriller, another is political drama, a third domestic tragedy, then you don't know where it's going and what's even what would count as an ending.
His Dark Materials – BBC TV drama, Series 2. Two very strong performances at its core, from Dafne Keen as Lyra and Ruth Wilson as Marisa Coulter, easily the scariest super-villain we've seen for some time. As with Series 1, though, closure is in short supply, so there's definitely a case for Series 3.
The Crown – Netflix TV drama, Series 3. We loved the first two series, which had a real sense of being driven by the transcendent Crown and its crushing demands on mere mortal humans, rather like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the films), but now it's become just a Royal soap opera, even if a well-made one. I don't think we'll go out of our way to catch the fourth series.
Portrait Artist of the Year – extraordinarily good television, even when (as usually happens) the sitter is someone apparently famous of whom we've never heard. It's just great to hear artists talking about what they're doing while they're doing it, and seeing the amazingly different ways they portray the same person.
Dracula – another fine dance production from Northern Ballet, one of our favourite companies, with great physical movement, costumes and lighting vividly conveying the Gothic horror in contrast to middle-class respectability. Thank you BBC for showing this during lockdown.
Revisor – a visually powerful piece of dance theatre, based on the Gogol play The Government Inspector, in which a minor bureaucratic functionary is mistaken for the very important inspector of the title and the various officials of a government department run around and bow and scrape to ingratiate themselves with him. The dialogue is pre-recorded by actors, and the dancers mime and move - how they move! - in sync with it to extraordinary effect.
How People Learn by Nick Shackleton-Jones – amusing and outspoken reflections on the design of training and education. Very much after my own heart, in his acidic comments on the e-learning which never amounts to more than an information dump and the education system's attempts to intimidate people into learning things they're not interested in learning. I think he's over the top in completely denying the existence of semantic memory (as distinct from episodic memory), but he's surely bang on in calling for learning (whether "push" or "pull") to be designed on a basis of affective context (and not just motivation).
Winterwatch: The Big Freeze 1963 – including the whole of a BBC documentary from early 1963 on the then-recent worst winter of the twentieth century, in which sub-zero temperatures persisted for months. Great to see familiar presenters from the past, such as Cliff Michelmore, and the low-tech but highly effective studio graphics, and scary to see how the country's infrastructure broke down. I'd have been four at the time, but I have no memory of it; my parents must have shielded me well.
Live from London: Christmas – another great series of livestreamed concerts arranged by Voces8, whose own performances (especially with baroque violinist Rachel Podger) were absolutely fantastic, though there were also other very good shows from Apollo5, The Tallis Scholars and I Fagiolini, as well as two overseas groups to discover: Anúna (from Dublin) and amarcord (from Germany). We also had the Gabrieli Consort performing the cantatas of Bach's Christmas Oratorio each on the day for which it was originally written, though these were rather disappointing. The a capella group concerts were definitely a highlight of this lockdown year; we could happily watch them again every Christmas.
Carols from King’s – another Christmas tradition adjusted for Covid-19: not merely no audience / congregation (expected) but no adult choir members either (having had to isolate), their place being taken by The King's Singers. Most excellent it was too, maybe even (whisper) better than the usual service? I think my expectations have been raised by the livestreamed and filmed Live from London concerts.
Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special – and again Covid-19 forcing a change of format. Instead of a handful of celebs performing one dance each, we got the top 25 dances from the past 17 years, as voted for by viewers, shown in their entirety (very important) with commentary from judges, pro dancers and sometimes the celebs themselves. Every dance was a stunner, of course, and how good it was to have a celebration of Strictly's long history.
No comments:
Post a Comment