Douglas is Cancelled – brilliantly-written (by Steven Moffat) and played (by Hugh Boneville and Karen Gillan principally) four-part drama, which starts as satirical comedy, a bit like W1A because of its TV news show setting, but then changes character episode by episode, until it ends in a very dark place, though the comedy is never entirely absent. Episode 3 in particular is very, very painful to watch, being the one where you find out for the first time what the whole story is about. The dialogue is brilliant; words which seem innocuous when first uttered change their meaning (or have their true meaning revealed?) when repeated or quoted by others. And your sympathies for the characters shift to and fro. (Well, except for a couple of them, maybe, who are quite clearly arseholes from the start.) A courageous piece of work.
Three Thousand Years of Longing – touching fantasy film, with Tilda Swinton as a Professor of Narratology who frees a djinn (Idris Elba) from a bottle and is therefore granted the customary three wishes. Knowing all the stories about trickster djinns, who bring people to destruction through their wishes, she is at first reluctant to play along, but as the djinn tries to prove his honesty by telling her the stories of how he previously came to be imprisoned and the wishes he granted, she begins to become closer to him. Philosophical as well as touching, forcing one to confront the question: what does one really want? And is one prepared to endure the shadow side of one’s deepest wish coming true?
Pan’s Labyrinth – visually striking and emotionally powerful film, set during the Spanish civil war. It centres on a young girl, trying to cope after the death of her father and her mother's re-marriage to a commander in the fascist army. Materially they are secure, but the girl is unhappy and a fantasy world of spirits, both fair and foul, becomes real to her. The interesting thing about the story is that the fantasy world proves to be no escape but just as frightening and dangerous as the real world, which itself – as the commander becomes increasingly deranged and brutal in his pursuit of the partisans – comes to seem no less fantastic that the fantasy world. You want the story to have a happy ending for the girl, but of course it doesn't; that really would have been unrealistic.
'AI Meets Classic Art' – Instagram post by 'latentcosmonaut' Juan Perdón, which animates some famous paintings in funny and very plausible ways. This is a beautiful and benign use of AI video generation, but raises the possibility of the same techniques being used for deception. (Referenced in a LinkedIn post by Donald Clark.)
Present Laughter – super National Theatre production of Noel Coward’s play, shown in my local cinema under the NT Live scheme. The main attraction was Andrew Scott in the lead role of a sybaritic, flamboyant actor at the height of his success (now, who can Coward have been thinking of!) whose life and career threatens to unravel through the collision of present and past lovers of both genders (some characters were gender-swopped for this production, the result seeming very natural). Scott did not disappoint, with a high-energy performance, which must have been exhausting because he was on stage almost the whole time. Nice to be reminded of how good live theatre can be, because MK Theatre doesn’t do it much any more, only musicals.
Doctor Who, the David Tennant era – because seeing him again in the Christmas specials last year reminded me of just how good he was: for my money, better than any of the other nu-Whos, except perhaps Peter Capaldi. Somehow at the time I gave. up on him – perhaps after a duff episode or two – so it’s been a joy to discover some of the cracking stories from his second season, especially the beautifully crafted and place-and-time-situated ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ (1930s New York, both rich and poor) and ‘Human Nature’ (a minor public school in 1913, on the brink of war). ‘Human Nature’ is especially poignant; it’s the one where the Doctor has to go into hiding by disguising himself as a human and completely forgets being a Time Lord, and when he learns about the Doctor he doesn’t want to be him. He has a good life as a schoolteacher, the prospect of a fulfilling marriage to the school’s matron; why would he want to become this lonely, unhappy alien? And as well as those great stories, there is the masterpiece that is ‘Blink’: in most people’s judgement the most frightening episode of Doctor Who ever, despite nothing horrible actually happening and the Doctor himself barely appearing (which is made into a feature, not a problem).
Alien Resurrection – surprisingly good instalment in the Alien franchise, which I avoided at the time because of the decidedly dodgy Alien 3, and I couldn’t see how Ripley could possibly come back in a plausible way. But back she is, and Sigournay Weaver is excellent and her performance sustains the film through all the fights and action sequences.
Grey Matter – replaying this adventure game was an interesting experience. I enjoyed it very much the first time, but second time around the surprises and shocks of the storyline naturally didn’t have the same impact and the clunkiness of the gameplay irritated me more and more. (Many objects can’t be picked up until a plot development gives you a reason for needing them - which is realistic but unkind to the player and not what one expects from a game these days. Also, despite having played it before, I repeatedly found myself stumped for what to do to advance the story.)
'Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary' – exhibition at Petworth Gallery. Well worth the long journey (and overnight stay) to see this nicely curated selection from the pioneer surrealist, now touted as “the next Freda Khalo” – meaning a woman artist who only become really famous (and valuable in sales terms) after her death. What attracted me was the strong dreamlike imagery in her paintings and sculptures: lots of animals, and people turning into animals, and animals turning into other animals – all very Jungian (whereas Dali, say, is more Freudian). In the last room of the exhibition, there’s a video interview in which she rejects her interviewer’s attempts to interpret her works and insists instead that you should just sit with them and let them work on you. Thus chastened, I returned to the start and went through the exhibition again, properly and slowly. Someone to keep an eye on.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – surprisingly good film version of the third book in C.S. Lewis's Narnia sequence, which I’d avoided previously because I didn’t think that much of the first film (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my least favourite of the books too). But this turned out to be really good, with credit especially to the boy who plays the horrible Eustace, who is one of Lewis’s recurring characterisation of the sceptic: the person who refuses to accept the reality of what is happening to them and insists on behaving as though they were still in the usual materialistic world. (In Eustace’s case, this takes the form of his repeatedly demanding to see the British Consul.) His character reformation (through being turned into a dragon – forcing him to confront his own greedy and selfish nature) is a bit accelerated, but his final farewell to Reepicheep the talking mouse is very moving. He actually breaks down and cries (how unusual is that to be acceptable in a boy?) when Reepicheep calls him a true friend – because he’s thinking, as we’re all thinking, of just how nasty and (to use the ironically appropriate contemporary word) beastly he was to the mouse at the start.
Ticket to Earth – very good strategy / puzzle game, just right for playing in short bursts. (See review.) The puzzle sequences are played on a grid, with certain rules determining how you can move and attack your opponents and enhance your powers (there’s a role-playing element), and a difficulty level which steadily increases at just the right rate. But importantly these puzzle sequences are embedded within a story which is told through cut scenes and still-frame dialogues. The story wouldn’t be up to much on its own, but it gives emotional involvement to the puzzles and an escalating sense of urgency and the stakes involved.
Julia by Sandra Newman – clever, involving and richly visualised re-telling of George Orwell’s 1984 from Julia’s point of view. We get to see the women’s dormitory, their sexual exploitation by senior male party members, the black market in essential supplies, and the Thought Police’s manipulation of Julia to entrap Winston Smith. (In this version, she is acting under instructions rom O’Brien from the start of their relationship – her later torture in the Ministry of Love notwithstanding.) Excellently written and a great concept: an alternative version which doesn’t invalidate the original but sets another perspective against it, thus opening out our view of this dystopian world.
Never Let Me Go – very good adaptation for the stage of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, which I've still not read but the excellent film version (with Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield) made me think the (eventual) emotional impact would work well on stage, and so it proved. Some very good acting and stagecraft kept the shifts between the same characters at different time periods distinct, although I wish actors wouldn't use that highly mannered totally unrealistic way of talking when they're pretending to be small children. A strong lead in Nell Barlow. Now I really must read the original novel...
Sally Face – very creepy and (mostly) very powerful adventure game. The graphics are simple and cartoony, there’s no voice acting and the interface is about as basic as it can be, and yet despite that – perhaps because of that – the suspense and horror come through all the more clearly. Only the final episode of the five is weak; it feels like the story had already reached its climax and the ending isn’t of the same quality; perhaps the developers were rushing or they’d used all of their good ideas by that point. It reminded me a lot of Cognition: another excellent shocking horrifically gory adventure game, whose final episode was also sub-par.
A House Through Time series 5 – every series of David Olusoga’s House Through Time is wonderful, but this is special: taking two houses (or rather, blocks of flats), one in London and one in Berlin, and following their inhabitants through the 1930s and then the Second World War. Nazi party members, Jews and Africans, a cinema owner, an “enemy alien”, pilots and soldiers and spies and saboteurs: the entire history of the period is here, in the lives of extraordinary ordinary people. Wonderful television.
Trüberbrook – visually impressive but flawed adventure game. The stop-motion models shot against actual sets looked great, but I failed to be interested in the fate of any the characters, and the storyline jerks all over the place. From a promising start, in the titular tiny German town of Trüberbrook, with a hint of uncanny things going on (a doctor obsessed with testing whether people are aliens, a neolithic burial site with indications of rituals, a theoretical physicist’s draft paper stolen by a disappearing figure), the plot then introduces a portal to another dimension and the gameplay degenerates into a long fetch-quest. I played it to the end (making liberal use of a walkthrough) but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Underground Blossom – like all the Rusty Lake games, a beautifully made series of escape rooms, set on an underground railway in which each station represents stages of a person’s life. Surprisingly emotionally engaging, through the characters’ appeals to you, the player, to help them, or to taunt you when they frustrate your aims. A good little game.
Curlew River by Benjamin Britten – powerful and moving filmed performance of this chamber opera in its 60th anniversary year, with Ian Bostridge quite heart-rending as The Madwoman and the strong stage presence of Willard White as The Abbott holding it all together.
Prim – decent point-and-click adventure game, which I helped to Crowdfund. Nice premise: teenage girl discovers that her absent father is actually Death himself, who of course has no idea how to be a father to her; the business of the game concerns her efforts to bring a friend back to life. What really makes the game is the voice-acting, especially that of Prim herself as a stroppy teenager, and the graphics, which are all in mock gothic shades of grey. Some of the puzzles are pretty hard, though, and the story didn't have quite enough forward momentum to carry me through happily.
Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar – this is always for me a highlight in the run-up to Christmas; I buy one for my niece and my grandson, as well as one for myself. This year the setting was Paris, with cafés, boutiques, patisseries and boulangiers, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, and your very own Paris apartment with a Christmas tree you can decorate and multiple games and puzzles appearing over the season, any of which could be a paid-for app in its own right. Lots of new things to do every day: a winning formula, which Jacquie Lawson has by now got down pat.
Conclave by Robert Harris – great and masterly novel. It’s now also a film, but I’m very glad to have read the book first, because no matter how good the acting (and with Ralph Finnes and Stanley Tucci the indications are excellent) the film can’t possibly reproduce the subtlety and above all the interiority of the book: the internal thoughts and (of course) prayers of the poor cardinal who has to run the conclave process to choose a new pope, and has somehow to investigate rumours of scandal surrounding the leading candidates while in isolation from the outside world. What I find most impressive is the detail, which I feared at first would be confusing, but it’s like background: you can look at just as much or as little of it as you like. If you do choose to look at it then it’s all authentic and plausible (as Catholic friends of mine have reported), but if you choose to let it slide past you then you miss nothing critical. That’s beautifully kind writing for the reader.
Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear – another good novel in the series featuring the detective Masie Dobbs, which I used to read with my wife in the last few months of her life. In this, the Great War continues to cast its long shadow over people's lives, as Masie investigates the apparently accidental death of a painter, whose emotionally honest depictions of the War ruffled feathers amongst the great and powerful.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe – a novel of now, or the very recent past, given that the key events are set during the ultra-short premiership of Liz Truss in 2022. I do like Coe's writing, which is both intelligent and compassionate, even when it's about people, such as here the libertarian extreme right, whom views he despises. It's also clever, spanning at least three genres, and also very funny (I laughed at loud at one joke about a boomerang which came back). Coe is a couple of years younger than me, so it was also interesting to see his view of Cambridge in the 1980s and the right-wing salons which supported the politics of Thatcher and Reagan. (There were left-wing salons then as well, of course, though those are not his concern; they probably had about as much influence on politics as the SDP.)
