Monday 8 September 2014

Seen and heard: August 2014

Bhaktivedanta Manor - the UK home of the ISKCON, bought for them by George Harrison while he was still alive. A walk in the beautiful grounds and an early-evening ceremony, for the birthday of a friend and former resident in the ashram.

The Art of China - BBC TV series with Andrew Graham Dixon. Some fabulous art, from pre-historic to contemporary, brought off the screen by AGD's knack of going to the emotional, and often spiritual, heart of a work.

Who Do They Think They Are? - one-off TV programme reviewing the ten-year-old BBC series and its winning formula, which never fails to turn up something of interest even if you've never heard of the celebrity in question. This is history, not as academic discipline, but as lived, discovered and owned; great stuff.

The Whispered World - a well-reviewed adventure game, but a disappointment to me. Something about the humour and the voice acting for me struck a wrong note. The game contains many dialogue trees, sometimes requiring you to locate the correct response, which inevitably means many efforts and many repetitions of dialogue lines: an extra irritation if you don't much like the dialogue anyway. Design point: anything your player is going to have to do many times needs to be smooth and not liable to become irritating on repetition.

In the Club - beautifully scripted and acted BBC drama series, centred on the women in an ante-natal group. As they give birth (at the carefully paced rate of one an episode) and their personal lives go through attendant crises, the relationships cross and criss-cross and characters you want to kick in one episode do the decent thing in another - or vice versa. A laugh-out-loud moment for me in the first episode, when the childbirth narrative was interrupted by a car chase complete with white van smashing through a car park barrier: clearly something put in to keep the boys happy!

Dr Who, new season - at last, a Doctor of my own age, with a bit of an edge to him. Astonishing to learn though, that William Hartnell the first Doctor (and my Doctor) was no older than Peter Capaldi is now when he took the role, despite his elderly appearance. Old age came to people earlier in those days.

Gilda - watched on DVD, because I'd somehow never got round to seeing it before; now I understand what all the excitement is about.

Proms 2014 - some lovely performances, including Steve Reich's 'The Desert Music' given a toe-tappingly catchy performance by Endeymion and the BBC Chorus; Bach's St John Passion in a deliberately up-beat interpretation by Sir Roger Norrington, with the chorus doing a really feisty job; and Duruflé's Requiem in a lovely full-orchestra rendition by the National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales.

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