Seen and heard: July to December 2021

One of Them: An Eton College Memoir, by Musa Okwonga – memories of his schooldays, by an ordinary black kid from Staines, unusual only in that he won a scholarship to Eton. Interesting, but I wish he had been as detailed in his accounts of the perpetuation of class culture as in his accounts of casual and not-so-casual racism. Sample: "Shamelessness is the superpower of a certain section of the English upper classes. While so many other people in the country are hamstrung by the deference and social embarrassment they have been taught since birth, the upper classes calmly parade on through the streets and boardrooms to claim the spoils. They don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, but this is where they perfect it." I think he's probably right, but precisely HOW this happens is still a mystery. (See interview and longer extract in The Guardian  and further extracts on Unbound. 

Tell Me Why – another good (but not great) adventure game from the producers of Life is Strange. Powerful setting (small-town Alaska) and setup (twins reunite as adults to clear out their single-parent mother's house, having been separated after her shocking death many years ago), with a sensitively explored sub-theme of transexuality (the boy twin was born a girl). I wasn't entirely happy with either of the two alternative endings, but it was definitely worth the journey. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)

Live from London Summer – more livestreamed concerts from Voces8 and their friends, some of them excellent, notably 'Angel of the Apocalypse' (Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, led by violinist Jack Liebeck), and Handel arias and duets sung by Mary Bevan and Barnaby Smith (see their new CD, with a YouTube sample of Barnaby singing 'Ombra Mai Fu'). Also a beautiful encore to the King's Singers concert, in which they formed a supergroup with Voces8: 'Lullabye', by Billy Joel.

Several classic films, which I saw for the first time on TV: Laura (powerful noir), The Innocents (really, really creepy, especially when vile insults spring out of the mouth of the sweet little boy), and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (odd but successful genre mashup). But the one that has stayed with me is Went the Day Well? (imagined German takeover of an English village during the early years of World War 2), especially after seeing again on TV the recent Their Finest (2016), about a WW2 film unit's making of a morale boosting Dunkirk drama. This made me think about how the film was put together and why, and how it would have been seen by audiences in 1942, with the events being set that very same year, a prologue and epilogue establishing a narrative perspective in the future, from after the end of the war, "when old Hitler got what was coming to him".

Professor T – sharply written and produced detective show, with Ben Miller excellent as the academic criminologist with OCD and Frances de la Tour as the (not unsympathetic) mother from hell. Proper plots too, with solutions which actually make sense, not a killer picked at random by the scriptwriter. Disappointed not to see more shots of Cambridge though, unlike Morse or Lewis where you can play the game of trying to be the first to spot the Sheldonian each time it turns up.

Write Around the World with Richard E Grant – short BBC series, exploring connections between famous works and the places they were written. In other words, an excuse to see around some exotic locations. Richard E Grant is a good travel companion, making this a superior documentary of its kind.

Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, Sam Peters, Secret Files 3 – decent adventure games, on the model of the original Secret Files: Tunguska, which means ridiculously large inventories and numerous locations making the puzzles challenging. The translations from the German have improved, though, so that the voiceovers flow more naturally. I was actually getting fond of Nina and Max by the end, though I still think she sounds too American for a Russian brought up in Germany.

The Mandalorian, Seasons 1 and 2 – binge-watched at a time when I needed some good distraction. Really confirms the thesis that science fiction has taken over the tropes of the Western, re-setting them with spaceships for horses and blasters for Colt 45s. One can certainly imagine the strong, silent hero being played by Clint Eastwood in his heyday.

John Eliot Gardiner, conducting Handel and Bach at the Proms – one of the most thrilling concerts I've heard in a long time, this 78-year-old bringing zip and punch to some great Baroque tunes.

A House Though Time, Season 4 – more slices of British lives, this time in Leeds, featuring stories of rags to riches and back to rags, exploitative capitalists and social campaigners, war and disease and journalism. Most moving was the reunion of former university students who had shared the house at the turn of the Millenium.

Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies – excellent TV series on Sky Arts, with good clips illustrating the evolving techniques composers used to achieve great film effects.

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – fascinating detail in this rapidly-produced collaboration with (ghost-writer?) "writer/editor" Deborah Crewe. But the most striking bit for me was Cath Green’s account of how she decided to write the book. In August 2020, during a lull in the vaccine work and while lockdown was lifted, she was on holiday with her daughter and friends at a campsite in Wales, and got into conversation with another camper while waiting for dinner from the pizza van. From talk about the poor mobile phone signal, the other woman voiced her concerns about 5G, and then went on to vaccines. "I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy. But I do worry that we don't know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don't trust them. They don't tell us the truth." At which point Cath Green came clean on what she did for a living, and that she was one of "them" and knew precisely what was in the vaccine because she was making it, and offered to answer any questions she had. They talked for about 15 minutes, though somehow I doubt that the other woman changed her mind. But at least the rest of us got this book out of it.

Listening through the Lens: The Christopher Nupen Films – BBC programme about a film maker who pioneered classical music documentaries on TV, using his privileged access to Daniel Barenboim and other performers of that generation to get an intimate behind-the-scenes view.

Jonny Quest documentary (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) – excellent and thorough (over 2 hours long) fan-film about the 1960s TV cartoon series, the first action adventure show from Hanna-Barbera, then most for comedy cartoons such as Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat and The Flintstones. It was hugely important to boys of my generation, and it still stands up well, though the representation of tribal peoples is very much of its time. More troubling to me now is its complete masculinity, with no regular female characters at all; Jonny's father is the government scientist, whose missions provide the basis for each episode, but we never even hear what happened to his mother. I still love it that Jonny's best friend Haji is Asian, even though it's remarkably unclear what kind of Asian he is. And I was delighted to discover that 'The Invisible Monster' is other fans' favourite episode also; it's definitely the most scary.

Shetland series 6 – top-notch BBC crime drama. We love it, though we have trouble remembering the story from one week to the next. Typical scene: Tosh is taking a call in the police headquarters, and puts down the phone looking aghast. "It's Sharon!" she gasps, and everyone looks stunned. And we think: "Who the hell is Sharon?" Maybe we need to take notes. But it's a testimony to the power of the writing, acting and filming that it keeps us gripped, even though we can't follow what's going on. God help us, there are unresolved plotlines at the end of this series which are being carried over to the next; they’d better give us a pretty good catch-up.

The Moment of Silence – German adventure game from 2004, resembling in some ways the wonderful Norwegian The Longest Journey (1999), especially in the extensive and well-written dialogues, but alas not in the quality of its characterisation or its storytelling. I don’t think it deserved its 4-star Adventure Gamers review.

Back to work video – funny and charming Belgian video, which did the rounds when people who'd been working from home during lockdown were starting to go back. (See the original, without English subtitles.) 

The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway – extraordinary documentary presented by Helen (H is for Hawk) Macdonald about the wildlife around the edges of the M25. She's a great guide; we should see more of her.

Drummers playing the BBC News theme – led by BBC weather presenter Owain Wyn Evans, finishing his 24-hour drum-athon for Children in Need live on the local news.

A Woman's Guide to Heart Disease, by Carolyn Thomas – important and useful book for women who have had heart attacks, chiefly for normalising their experience and letting them know that it’s quite usual for women, rather than falling to the floor grasping their chest (as is the cliché for men) to try to continue with their regular activities, thinking “blimey my heartburn / asthma / angina is bad today." Also that it’s usual to be frustrated at how long it takes to recover any amount of strength, depressed at the new kind of person one has become, and to have people say “you’re looking really well” when you know you’re going to be in a state of collapse in an hour’s time.

Strictly Come Dancing 2021 – a very strong set of celebrities this year, with no absolutely plonkers and a lot who with no previous background turned out to be really quite good, though not necessarily consistently. Rose and Giovanni fully deserved their win, with a beautiful Couple’s choice (including silent interlude), but I wish we’d seen AJ and Kai in the final too (she had to withdraw due to injury), because they did a tremendous Quickstep the previous week, or alternatively that Rhys and Nancy (who were eliminated at Semi-final stage) could have been promoted to take part, because they did some tremendous dances, such as their Argentine tango.

Because Internet: Understanding how Language is Changing, by Gretchen McCulloch – really good analysis of internet language, by a linguist not a technologist, so delightfully free of techno-hype. Also great that it's historical, so she distinguishes several groups of internet people: (1) old internet people, who used bulletin boards before the World Wide Web, and are probably the most technically skilled; (2) full internet people, who went online in the second wave around 2000 and used it as a medium for their social lives; (3) semi-internet people, who went online in the same wave but used it for work or functional purposes; (4) pre-internet people, who went online in a third wave, when use of it became unavoidable, but whose lives were largely lived before it; (5) post-internet people, who have never known a time without the internet, who came to it when their parents were already on Facebook. All these groups use language on the internet in a different way. It's not just about emojis.

The Truth – clever and moving French film, with Catherine Deneuve as a film actor who has just published her autobiography and Juliette Binoche as her daughter who disputes her account of events. We get hints: is the mother's memory playing tricks (could she perhaps be in early stage dementia), or is she being manipulative - or is the real truth that all storytelling, all acting involves placing a construction on the world? The questions are explored, as she takes a part in a science fiction film, playing the elderly daughter of a space traveller who remains eternally young. A good watch.

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by Jonathan Van-Tam – now this is what we pay our licence fee for: JVT (as everyone calls him), familiar as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health on the podium but here appearing as a scientist and virologist, giving school kids the lowdown on just what viruses are, how they spread, and how vaccines work against them. Best bit was in the demonstration of mathematical modelling, by one of his guest presenters, which had the kids holding up their phones while a wirelessly connected connected app changed the screen colour: blue or yellow, depending on their R number or infection rate, and red if they were infected. In the first few runs, the infection petered out after a few iterations. But with just a small change to the starting conditions, you heard the kids giving out little squeaks of fright as phone after phone went red, spreading the disease across the lecture hall.

Cuttings: December 2021

The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next? – article by Rutrger Bregman in The Correspondent, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Where the neoliberals had spent years preparing for the crises of the 1970s, [in the financial crash of 2008] their challengers now stood empty-handed. Mostly, they just knew what they were against. Against the cutbacks. Against the establishment. But a programme? It wasn’t clear enough what they were for…. Now, 12 years later, crisis strikes again. One that’s more devastating, more shocking, and more deadly… But the most important distinction between 2008 and now? The intellectual groundwork. The ideas that are lying around. … [Gabriel] Zucman [has become] one of the world’s leading tax experts. In his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), he worked out that $7.6tn of the world’s wealth is hidden in tax havens. … His mentor [Thomas] Piketty released another doorstopper in 2020 … but Zucman and Saez’s book can be read in a day. Concisely subtitled ‘How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay,’ it reads like a to-do list for the next US president…. [And] where is wealth actually created? Media like the Financial Times have often claimed – like their neoliberal originators, Friedman and Hayek – that wealth is made by entrepreneurs, not by states. Governments are at most facilitators. … But in 2011, after hearing the umpteenth politician sneeringly call government workers ‘enemies of enterprise', [Mariana Mazzucato] decided to do some research. Two years later, she’d written a book that sent shockwaves through the policymaking world. Title: The Entrepreneurial State. In her book, Mazzucato demonstrates that not only education and healthcare and garbage collection and mail delivery start with the government, but also real, bankable innovations. Take the iPhone. Every sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone (internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition) was developed by researchers on a government payroll…. When government subsidises a major innovation, she says industry is welcome to it. What’s more, that’s the whole idea! But then the government should get its initial outlay back – with interest. It’s maddening that right now the corporations getting the biggest handouts are also the biggest tax evaders. Corporations like Apple, Google, and Pfizer, which have tens of billions tucked away in tax havens around the world.”

4 Easy Steps to Take Back Control Of Your Privacy in 2022 – "1. Email provider: Fastmail..... 2. Password Manager: 1Password.... 3. Search Engine: DuckDuckGo.. 4. Web Browser: Get Off Google Chrome."

All hail Cat Jesus! The fantastic feline artist behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s latest biopic – article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.… Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up. Yet, as the forthcoming Benedict Cumberbatch-produced biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain relates, these popular pussycats didn’t give him a happy life. Tragedy and financial ruin soured the milk. He started to believe there was something sinister about electricity, and that his sisters were stealing his money. After attacking them, he was certified insane in 1924 and spent the rest of his life in asylums.”

When meditation turns toxic: the woman exposing spiritual sexism – article by Rachel Mabe in The Guardian. “[After] she … lost a pregnancy and [was] abused by her spiritual teacher in front of her community, [Tara Brach] came to the realization that the world of meditation had a serious problem with sexism and patriarchal practices. [Thirty-eight years later,] Brach has become a spiritual leader… She releases one guided meditation and one dharma talk weekly; more than 2.5 million people listen every month. … While some types of meditation require practitioners to completely detach from earthly concerns,… Brach’s brand of meditation focuses on compassion towards emotions during meditation.… Brach’s ‘little acronym’ Rain … moves through four steps – recognizing difficult emotions, allowing them to be there, investigating them with curiosity and nurturing them with love.”

How to Fix Social Media – article by Nicholas Carr in The New Atlantis, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation.... By once again making [the distinctions between different forms of communication that guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era], particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions.... The postal system remained the sole technology for long-distance personal communication until the construction of the telegraph system in the middle of the nineteenth century.... Despite the legislative and judicial wrangling, the public never had any doubt that messages sent over wires should be as secure as letters carried in pouches.... Radio broadcasting had no such precedent. For the first time, a large, dispersed audience could receive the same information simultaneously and without delay from a single source.... Amateurs ... played a crucial role in the development of radio technology, and ... some, in another foreshadowing of the net, were bent on mischief and mayhem.... The nuisance became a crisis in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank after its fateful collision with an iceberg. Efforts to rescue the passengers were hindered by a barrage of amateur radio messages. The messages clogged the airwaves, making it hard for official transmissions to get through. Worse, some of the amateurs sent out what we would today call fake news, including a widely circulated rumor that the Titanic remained seaworthy and was being towed to a nearby port for repairs."

Rewritten history – article by Richard J, Evans in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2018 the [National Trust] launched a schools-focused project called Colonial Countryside, pointing out that ‘British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy. As historians take new approaches to British imperial history, … less familiar and often newly discovered colonial stories of our places are being uncovered.’ Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’.… In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’.… There is also evidence of interference in the museum sector, where trustees have apparently been threatened by the government with the non-renewal of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway). Another example of the government’s willingness to weaponise the past is Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, the information booklet on which applicants for naturalised British citizenship are examined as part of their admission process. In July 2020, the Historical Association posted a letter signed by 175 historians denouncing the document as ‘fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false’ in its account of slavery, the slave trade and the process of decolonisation.“

Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country – article by Richard Beard in The Guardian, extracted from his book Sad Little Men, referenced in Guardian Letters. “March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.… One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were…In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up ‘the right habits for life’. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip…. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the ‘hardness of heart of the educated’, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class. … According to [Lucille] Iremonger [in her book Fiery Chariot, describing ‘the Phaeton complex’], a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.”

Auld Lang Syne arm-linking at new year connected to Freemasons, book finds – article by PA Media in The Guardian. “Dr Morag Grant, a musicologist at the University of Edinburgh – who has published a book about the song – spotted the masonic link while sifting through the archives of Glasgow’s Mitchell library. A newspaper report of an Ayrshire lodge’s Burns supper in 1879 describes the song being sung as members formed ‘the circle of unity’– a common masonic ritual also called the ‘chain of union’.… Burns was a Freemason all his adult life and the organisation was instrumental in promoting his work during his lifetime and after his death…. Grant’s study shows Auld Lang Syne’s global fame preceded the invention of sound recording and radio, despite many commentators having previously linked its rise to the dawn of the broadcast era.“

How one writer’s new year resolution got complicated – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “First draft: write a book. Second draft revised by editor: write a GOOD book. Third draft with publisher’s input: write a good book THAT SELLS. Final draft, approved by editor, publisher and downstairs neighbour Marco: write a good book that sells WITHOUT PACING AROUND QUITE SO MUCH.”