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.
Thursday 14 January 2021
Friday 1 January 2021
Cuttings: December 2020
Cambridge Dictionary names 'quarantine’ Word of the Year 2020 – article by Tom Almeroth-Williams on the University of Cambridge Research website. "Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top five for both search spikes (28,545) and overall views (more than 183,000 by early November)... The Cambridge Dictionary editors have also tracked how people are using quarantine, and have discovered a new meaning emerging: a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease. Research shows the word is being used synonymously with lockdown, particularly in the United States, to refer to a situation in which people stay home to avoid catching the disease. Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary Publishing Manager, said: '... Neither coronavirus nor COVID-19 appeared among the words that Cambridge Dictionary users searched for most this year. We believe this indicates that people have been fairly confident about what the virus is. Instead, users have been searching for words related to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic, as evidenced not just by quarantine but by the two runners-up on the shortlist for Word of the Year: lockdown, and pandemic itself."
Can American democracy survive Donald Trump? – article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. “As [Hannah] Arendt understood, in its attempt to change the record, lying ‘is a form of action’. In this sense, lies are what the linguist JL Austin called ‘performative’ utterances, statements that can transform social reality instead of merely describing it – but only under rigidly defined circumstances. When a judge says ‘guilty as charged’, the defendant’s life changes, but only if they’re both in a courtroom under the ritualised conditions of ‘due process’. If a judge says it at home watching a legal drama, the statement has no effect. This is why it was so absurd when Trump tweeted during the election, ‘I hereby claim Massachusetts’ – because none of the conditions that would give that statement performative force had been met. He was just an old man shouting at clouds. But when [in a Tweet of 16 November, 10 days after the election] he pronounces ‘I WON THE ELECTION!’ he is trying to imbue his claim performatively with the symbolic authority of his office. That authority depends entirely on collective recognition. It matters that most world leaders have now ‘recognised’ Joe Biden as America’s president-elect: society’s acceptance is what gives language performative power.... Trump has spent four years exerting political power to make reality conform to his every assertion. This is both a theocratic performance, and a totalitarian one. The more deranged the assertion, the better it served his purpose: the statements had to be wildly detached from reality, so as to make clear his power to bend reality toward his word. Godlike Trump pronounced, and people scrambled to make it real – or to appear real. That was the essence of ‘Sharpiegate’, for example, when a weather map did not conform to Trump’s description of Hurricane Dorian’s path. Having crudely altered the map with a Sharpie pen, Trump insisted that official records be altered to conform to his claims. As philosophers of language have pointed out, the crudity was not an error, it was the point. Trump was not aiming to deceive, he was performing divine fiat: make it so. This is precisely the process of ‘rectifying’ official records that Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four; in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ two years earlier he’d noted that ‘totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past’.”
The Godless Gospel by Julian Baggini review: Jesus as a moral teacher – review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. “Baggini sees that Jesus was a divisive, iconoclastic figure who declared that he had come to tear families apart. The book also highlights the fact that he had almost nothing to say about sex.... His demands are fearsomely exacting: we can flourish only by a transformation of the self so deep-seated that it amounts to self-dispossession.... Moved by Jesus but sceptical of his divinity, Baggini devotes the last part of his book to rewriting the Gospel by leaving out most of the supernatural bits. ... For all its insights, this account can’t quite escape the dualist thought of the modern age. It claims, for example, that ‘the important changes to be made are within our hearts, not within our societies’; yet when Jesus speaks of ‘the things that are God’s’, his listeners would have known that this meant welcoming the stranger, caring for the widows and orphans, protecting the poor against the violence of the rich and other such scriptural injunctions. Jesus’s God is the Yahweh of the Book of Isaiah, who tells his pathologically religious people that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils, and asks them what they are doing about social justice.... Baggini sees Jesus’s selflessness as a kind of asceticism, but it is actually a form of self-giving, not a Puritan hostility to the flesh. In fact, he and his followers were denounced as gluttons and drunkards. His so-called morality isn’t a matter of what Baggini rather lamely calls ‘being good’ and ‘doing the right thing’, but of abundance of life. At Pentecost, his disciples are so reeling and ecstatic with the stuff that one of them has to remind the onlookers that the wine shops aren’t yet open. There are times when the book makes Jesus sound less like a moral teacher than a modern therapist, concerned with ‘personal growth’ and ‘moral health’. But the New Testament isn’t a spiritual self-help manual. Jesus’s mission was to Israel, not in the first place (as Baggini argues) to the individual. It was directed against suffering and oppression, not against bad vibes and low self-esteem. One can only understand it fully against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest empires in history.”
The magnifying glass: how Covid revealed the truth about our world – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “Trump was only the most garish example of a pattern that became identifiable across the globe. The populist loudmouths, the braggarts whose stock in trade was railing against the experts, imagining themselves to be free of the laws of factual reality, fared badly against a threat as real as the virus, a menace that could not be talked away with a rally, an insult or a joke. Several contracted it themselves.... Again, none of this was exactly novel. Even before the pandemic struck, it was clear that Merkel and others valued quiet, technocratic competence while Johnson’s administration was built on slogans and myths, rhetoric and promises, prizing chummy loyalty over the hard graft of good governance. But Covid put that contrast in lights. ... Through it all, Johnson – a leader for sunny days who found himself facing a hurricane – tried to dodge his duty to deliver bad news. Again and again, he served up false cheer. ... As if to fill the vacuum, leadership came from other quarters, some of them unexpected.... Inequality is so entrenched, it can feel like a law of nature. Even so, the coronavirus lens managed to magnify it in new and sharp ways. US politicians like to speak of the difference between jobs where you shower before you go to work and jobs where you shower once you get home. In the age of Covid, that distinction between white- and blue-collar labour found a new form: those who could work from home, and those who couldn’t.”
The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument – article by David Robson in The Guardian. “Discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions. (1) Ask ‘how rather than ‘why’.... (2) Fill their knowledge gap with a convincing story.... (3) Reframe the issue.... (4) Appeal to an alternative identity.... (5) Persuade them to take an outside perspective.... (6) Be kind."
This is the last exit to Brexit. But in truth, there was only ever one road – article by Rafael Behr in The Guardian. ”There is one Brexit deal. There has only ever been one. ... It is this: the UK will give up wealth in exchange for sovereignty. In what proportions and over what timescale is the only real subject of negotiation. ... Leavers started from a position of denial that sovereignty had any price at all – that Brexit was all upside. That case rested on two pillars. First was the idea that EU membership was a drag on Britain, an unwanted subscription service that could be cancelled and the money redirected to better causes. Second was the belief that Europeans would be so sad to lose access to British markets that they would agree to continue something like the old service without charge. Those things were not true, but the Brexiteers believed they could be made true by force of conviction and a more aggressive negotiating stance. Meanwhile, remainers saw the whole deal as a scam. The price was too high and the sovereignty being bought was worthless. ... But that argument has never had traction with leavers. The claim that Brexit has no value is palpable nonsense to tens of millions of people who, by the act of voting, bestowed it with profound emotional significance.”
Can American democracy survive Donald Trump? – article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. “As [Hannah] Arendt understood, in its attempt to change the record, lying ‘is a form of action’. In this sense, lies are what the linguist JL Austin called ‘performative’ utterances, statements that can transform social reality instead of merely describing it – but only under rigidly defined circumstances. When a judge says ‘guilty as charged’, the defendant’s life changes, but only if they’re both in a courtroom under the ritualised conditions of ‘due process’. If a judge says it at home watching a legal drama, the statement has no effect. This is why it was so absurd when Trump tweeted during the election, ‘I hereby claim Massachusetts’ – because none of the conditions that would give that statement performative force had been met. He was just an old man shouting at clouds. But when [in a Tweet of 16 November, 10 days after the election] he pronounces ‘I WON THE ELECTION!’ he is trying to imbue his claim performatively with the symbolic authority of his office. That authority depends entirely on collective recognition. It matters that most world leaders have now ‘recognised’ Joe Biden as America’s president-elect: society’s acceptance is what gives language performative power.... Trump has spent four years exerting political power to make reality conform to his every assertion. This is both a theocratic performance, and a totalitarian one. The more deranged the assertion, the better it served his purpose: the statements had to be wildly detached from reality, so as to make clear his power to bend reality toward his word. Godlike Trump pronounced, and people scrambled to make it real – or to appear real. That was the essence of ‘Sharpiegate’, for example, when a weather map did not conform to Trump’s description of Hurricane Dorian’s path. Having crudely altered the map with a Sharpie pen, Trump insisted that official records be altered to conform to his claims. As philosophers of language have pointed out, the crudity was not an error, it was the point. Trump was not aiming to deceive, he was performing divine fiat: make it so. This is precisely the process of ‘rectifying’ official records that Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four; in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ two years earlier he’d noted that ‘totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past’.”
The Godless Gospel by Julian Baggini review: Jesus as a moral teacher – review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. “Baggini sees that Jesus was a divisive, iconoclastic figure who declared that he had come to tear families apart. The book also highlights the fact that he had almost nothing to say about sex.... His demands are fearsomely exacting: we can flourish only by a transformation of the self so deep-seated that it amounts to self-dispossession.... Moved by Jesus but sceptical of his divinity, Baggini devotes the last part of his book to rewriting the Gospel by leaving out most of the supernatural bits. ... For all its insights, this account can’t quite escape the dualist thought of the modern age. It claims, for example, that ‘the important changes to be made are within our hearts, not within our societies’; yet when Jesus speaks of ‘the things that are God’s’, his listeners would have known that this meant welcoming the stranger, caring for the widows and orphans, protecting the poor against the violence of the rich and other such scriptural injunctions. Jesus’s God is the Yahweh of the Book of Isaiah, who tells his pathologically religious people that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils, and asks them what they are doing about social justice.... Baggini sees Jesus’s selflessness as a kind of asceticism, but it is actually a form of self-giving, not a Puritan hostility to the flesh. In fact, he and his followers were denounced as gluttons and drunkards. His so-called morality isn’t a matter of what Baggini rather lamely calls ‘being good’ and ‘doing the right thing’, but of abundance of life. At Pentecost, his disciples are so reeling and ecstatic with the stuff that one of them has to remind the onlookers that the wine shops aren’t yet open. There are times when the book makes Jesus sound less like a moral teacher than a modern therapist, concerned with ‘personal growth’ and ‘moral health’. But the New Testament isn’t a spiritual self-help manual. Jesus’s mission was to Israel, not in the first place (as Baggini argues) to the individual. It was directed against suffering and oppression, not against bad vibes and low self-esteem. One can only understand it fully against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest empires in history.”
The magnifying glass: how Covid revealed the truth about our world – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “Trump was only the most garish example of a pattern that became identifiable across the globe. The populist loudmouths, the braggarts whose stock in trade was railing against the experts, imagining themselves to be free of the laws of factual reality, fared badly against a threat as real as the virus, a menace that could not be talked away with a rally, an insult or a joke. Several contracted it themselves.... Again, none of this was exactly novel. Even before the pandemic struck, it was clear that Merkel and others valued quiet, technocratic competence while Johnson’s administration was built on slogans and myths, rhetoric and promises, prizing chummy loyalty over the hard graft of good governance. But Covid put that contrast in lights. ... Through it all, Johnson – a leader for sunny days who found himself facing a hurricane – tried to dodge his duty to deliver bad news. Again and again, he served up false cheer. ... As if to fill the vacuum, leadership came from other quarters, some of them unexpected.... Inequality is so entrenched, it can feel like a law of nature. Even so, the coronavirus lens managed to magnify it in new and sharp ways. US politicians like to speak of the difference between jobs where you shower before you go to work and jobs where you shower once you get home. In the age of Covid, that distinction between white- and blue-collar labour found a new form: those who could work from home, and those who couldn’t.”
The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument – article by David Robson in The Guardian. “Discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions. (1) Ask ‘how rather than ‘why’.... (2) Fill their knowledge gap with a convincing story.... (3) Reframe the issue.... (4) Appeal to an alternative identity.... (5) Persuade them to take an outside perspective.... (6) Be kind."
This is the last exit to Brexit. But in truth, there was only ever one road – article by Rafael Behr in The Guardian. ”There is one Brexit deal. There has only ever been one. ... It is this: the UK will give up wealth in exchange for sovereignty. In what proportions and over what timescale is the only real subject of negotiation. ... Leavers started from a position of denial that sovereignty had any price at all – that Brexit was all upside. That case rested on two pillars. First was the idea that EU membership was a drag on Britain, an unwanted subscription service that could be cancelled and the money redirected to better causes. Second was the belief that Europeans would be so sad to lose access to British markets that they would agree to continue something like the old service without charge. Those things were not true, but the Brexiteers believed they could be made true by force of conviction and a more aggressive negotiating stance. Meanwhile, remainers saw the whole deal as a scam. The price was too high and the sovereignty being bought was worthless. ... But that argument has never had traction with leavers. The claim that Brexit has no value is palpable nonsense to tens of millions of people who, by the act of voting, bestowed it with profound emotional significance.”
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