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.
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