‘All Good Things...’ – final double episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1994). Caught it on rerun, and was delighted to be reminded of how good the show was, at its best. Great characters, great concepts, and in this case a supremely crafted punchy script, featuring increasingly rapid cross-cutting between three timelines.
The West Wing – watched again on box set, starting in the run up to the US election, because we needed an antidote to the Trump presidency. Seasons 4 and 5 are still the weakest, the victim of a need to follow contemporary post-9/11 politics with a terrorist-crisis-of-the-week, but the first three and the last two seasons stand up excellently. Deeply rich and demanding; some episodes I felt I was only properly understanding now. when watching for the third time.
His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman – re-reading the novels in the wake of the second season of the TV, to remind myself of the third part of the story. (Can’t see how they’ll ever film that one.) A good yarn, with memorable scenes, but I still feel the overall narrative is wandering and directionless and I can’t get my head around the shape of the whole thing.
Deponia / Chaos on Deponia / Goodbye Deponia / Deponia Doomsday – popular sequence of cartoon style point-and-click adventure games, published between 2012 and 2016, telling the story of arch-slacker Rufus’s efforts to escape the junk planet of Deponia and reach the paradise world of Elysia. The voice acting is good and the scripting is funny and hint-laden, which is just as well because there are a stupidly large number of bizarre objects and places where they might be used to solve a puzzle. Rufus himself is puerile, self-centred and rude, and on the whole the writing is sufficiently smart for this to be funny, though there are several places, especially in the third game, where his misogyny and racism seems to be endorsed by the game design, leaving a bad taste in the mouth. The fourth game, a supplement to the originally planned trilogy, redeemed the sequence for me, and I was glad to end on a happier note.
Live from London Spring – Another fine season of livestreamed concerts led by Voces8. Highlight for me was their performance of Jonathan Dove's The Passing of the Year (several songs from which Polymnia performed a couple of years ago), especially the blistering conclusion to the sequence 'Ring Out Wild Bells'. As previously, the sound balance was disappointingly off in some of the concerts with larger forces, especially the Fauré Requiem, but they got it right for a splendid Bach B Minor Mass.
Elizabeth R – landmark TV series from 1971, with Glenda Jackson suitably commanding in the title role, reshown as part of the BBC's lockdown plundering of the archive. It stands up very well, despite the limitation of being almost entirely studio-recorded; the Shakespearean ethos is so strong you’re quite comfortable with, for example, the Wyatt Rebellion and the Spanish Armada taking place off-stage.
Can't Get You Out of My Head – another hypnotically compelling documentary series from the mighty Adam Curtis, though as usual when coming round after each episode I found myself wondering what exactly I’d just seen. I >think< it was about Britain’s difficult adjustment to the loss of empire, the rise of individualism and failed dreams of revolution, the rise of China, and of course money and power. As always, Curtis and his researchers have found some astonishingly powerful film material in the archive.
Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley – for a change, she’s not dressing up herself; instead actors movingly recreate the transformed and shattered lives of six people in World War 2 Britain. Her conclusion: the idea of the Blitz Spirit >was< manufactured, for political purposes, but behind it was real suffering, resilience, and courage in the face of danger.
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