The Gold – well-made BBC drama series, about the efforts of the police to bring to justice those who profited from the Brink's-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Every aspect is beautifully realised: both the task force (led by Hugh Bonneville as a hard-nosed copper, a million miles away from Lord Grantham) and the villains, whose drives and motivations are meticulously explored. No simple greed here, but in most cases the desire to escape from poverty and to get for themselves a share of the luxury others seemed to be grabbing in the acquisitive '80s: when owning a Spanish house with a swimming pool was the summit of desire. Because in fact the story turns out not to be about the gold, which was rapidly melted down, but about the money it spawned, much of it laundered through property development, thus increasing it to many times its original value. There are points where you want to kick the villains, in their smug defiance of the police, and yet there are other times – as their schemes and their lives start to unravel – when you almost feel sorry for them. Good drama, and a window on the times.
Shifty – latest documentary clip essay from Adam Curtis, this time looking at power shifts in Britain in the 1980s and '90s, and in particular the decline of trust: "not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves" (from his own article about it). I found that explanation necessary, because I found this series much harder to get into than his previous; the clips were striking, but what story were they telling? Even having watched the whole series (and it does get clearer in Episodes 2-4), I still feel that he’s telling us what happened, but not why – other than occasional gestures towards economic forces (which would fit with his critical theoretical outlook). Maybe, as Lucy Mangan suggests, one should let it just wash over one, like a piece of music or a work of art, and see what impression it leaves. But I do want something more from my history. I found something much more interesting afterwards in a transcript of a conversation between Curtis and Ari Aster, the director of Eddington, in which he said: "Increasingly over the last four or five years, people have retreated into themselves and are blaming their own past. They’re not only playing back the music or films of the past, they’re playing back their own past and finding in those fragments of their memory the reasons why they are feeling bad, anxious, uncertain, afraid and lonely – and it’s given the term trauma. Trauma is a very specific, real and frightening for those who experience it. But recently it’s been widened to such an extent that you are blaming yourself all the time through your own reworking of the past. Rather like AI goes back and reworks the past and plays it back to you. Now you’re doing that to yourself.” The sadness and anger coming from a sense of loss of an imagined (and imaginary) past is one of the factors driving contemporary politics, and I can’t help wondering if a better relationship with history, and one’s own history, might contribute to healing and help people live better and more honestly (if still uncomfortably) in the present.
The Sense of an Ending – beautiful and engaging film from the Julian Barnes novel, with Jim Broadbent as an elderly curmudgeon, dealing awkwardly with his ex-wife and heavily pregnant daughter, who is prompted to revisit memories of his first great love and the related suicide of one of his school friends. Sensitive and powerful, as is typical with Barnes, and a deep acknowledgement of the incompleteness and fallibility of memory and the impossibility of truly knowing what is in someone else's mind – and the necessity of living with those limitations, nonetheless.
Red Pockets, by Alice Mah – vivid meditation on ancestors, environmental catastrophe, and relationship with future generations, all anchored in the concrete detail of Mah's journey to her ancestral village in China, where her ancestors' graves lie not merely unswept but unmarked, her work as an environmental scientist and attendance at Cop26, and her own history of migration from Canada to Coventry to Glasgow. By the end of the book, she seems to achieve her own balance, at peace with her "hungry ghosts", less stricken with eco-anxiety as she learns not to recycle despair, and with a Buddhist kind of acceptance. But there are gaps which you have to fill in for yourself – as indeed there should be, for this is not a template to copy but a sketch or outline of a movement we might all try to make in our own lives.
King Richard III Centre, Leicester – very nice museum by the site where his body was discovered in 2012 under what was then a municipal car park but at the time of his death had been a monastery burial ground. The ground floor is on the Wars of the Roses (even with heroic efforts at simplification the family / political hostilities are still mighty complicated), rehabilitating (as is now usual) Richard’s image from Shakespeare’s Tudor-interested calumnies, ending with the Battle of Bosworth Field, after which the victorious Henry Tudor, having had himself crowned Henry VII, re-write history by making Parliament pass an Act back-dating his coronation to the day before the battle, thus making everyone who had opposed him guilty of treason. The first floor is on the discovery and medical/scientific verification of his body: an extraordinary story, though one largely familiar to me having seen it unfold on television news at the time. Interesting to see how since then Richard has become a local hero (no longer the evil king of Shakespeare’s play and history textbooks, as he was until Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time (1951) popularised the argument that this was all Tudor propaganda, with slender evidential base); now pubs and cafés are named after him. A reversal of what happened after Bosworth Field, when a local inn called The White Boar – Richard’s heraldic emblem – quickly changed its name to The Red Boar - the heraldic emblem of one of the supporters of the royal usurper.
The Traitors, season 1 – a guilty pleasure, a very guilty pleasure. The Traitors-themed Prom in the BBC Proms programme prompted me to find out at last what this cultural phenomenon was all about, and OMG, I found it fascinating in a very dark and pathological way: like watching a car crash, you just can’t look away. Brilliantly designed and edited, with high production values, but OMG. The players, in a beautiful Scottish castle, do team games to increase their pot of potential winnings, but some of them have been secretly designated Traitors who each night can “murder” (eliminate) one of the others (the Faithful). And each evening, all the players vote to banish one of their number whom they think is a Traitor. The team games encourage and promote trust and collaboration, the banishments encourage and promote suspicion and mistrust, so the whole situation is perfectly calculated to mess with their heads. The first banishment was especially alarming for the certainty with which the players convinced themselves that they’d identified a Traitor – which they hadn’t, of course, there bring no evidence to go on. It made me think of how a medieval village would point the finger at a supposed witch, or accuse a Jew of having poisoned the well, or how Christopher Jefferies was accused by tabloid press and public opinion of having been the murderer of his tenant Joanna Watts (it turned out his only crime was having a dodgy haircut). The players were all (mostly) nice and basically decent people, and yet the pressure of the situation took them into fantasies to which they held with absolute conviction – until the game revealed that them to be completely wrong. Scary and horrible – and utterly fascinating, so that I had to watch the season to the end.
You Talkin’ to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama, by Sam Leith – clear and very funny exposition of classical rhetoric, using familiar examples from political history, though being first published in 2011 it doesn't include Trump and the current wave of populists. (It does include Hitler and Churchill.) Tremendous and highly readable as the book is however, it does have two major limitations. The first is that that the terminology of classical rhetoric isn't mapped on that of contemporary linguistics; for example we hear about "ethos", or presenting yourself as the right kind of person to be speaking on the subject, as the first part of rhetoric, but there's no clue that linguists today would call this "positioning". The second is that the examples, and by implication the scope of rhetoric, are drawn from politics and law, which is fair enough, except that there are many other areas of life in which people encounter rhetoric these days: I would mention advertising and management. I'm all for increasing people's love and appreciation of and competence in rhetoric, which is the author's goal, but given that most of us aren't lawyers or politicians I'd have liked to see it brought closer to everyday life.
Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home, exhibition at the Weston Library, Oxford – the basic story of the early days of broadcast radio, told through the artefacts of producers (chiefly the BBC), is familiar; more interesting is the testimony of listeners, compiled by audience researchers Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, on the effect radio was having on their lives. As the first mass medium bringing the outside world into the home, its impact was unexpected and profound, comparable to that of the internet at the end of the century. It was also very sudden; I was surprised to see that radio usage reached a majority of the population within just a few years – faster than internet access. Also salutery to be reminded that radio listening was then as much a collective activity (on a sitting room set) as an individual one (on headphones). The next big change, I think, was the rise in the 1960s of the transistor radio (often called a “transistor” or “tranny”, after its core technology) which made radios portable, so that young people could take their music with them wherever they went.
Inter Alia – blisteringly good play (streamed to cinemas), with a tremendous high-energy performance by Rosamund Pike, on stage continuously for the full duration, giving first-person stream-of-consciousness, changing place, emotion, mood, in an instant. We first see her as a judge, commanding her court like a rock star, protecting a vulnerable witness in a rape trial from the hostility of the (male) barrister defending her (alleged) assailant; then as a mother, still as protective and concerned for the wellbeing of her now late-teenage son as she was when he was little. And then the two sides of her life come into conflict when a girl makes online accusations against him after a party. He’s a decent boy: confused and gauche, maybe, but definitely not evil, and she’s brought him up to respect women and understand the importance of consent, so what’s going on? Proper, proper theatre: great characters raising powerful and immediate issues. I ended up seeing it twice, because the first time the streaming broke down so we missed the last five minutes and didn’t find out how it ended – and it was even better the second time. (See an interesting and illuminating interview with author Suzie Miller.)
Breaking the Code – biographical drama about Alan Turing, which I first saw in a television production in the 1980s with Derek Jacobi in the lead role. More proper theatre, in a great revival at the wonderful Northampton Royal; very timely too, with Turing’s speculations about the possibilities and implications of intelligent machines having proved to be deeply prescient. The lovely thing about this play, by contrast with say The Imitation Game (a more recent biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing) is that we actually get to hear Turing talking about maths and codes and computing machines, so that he comes across properly as a celebrity mathematician, not just a celebrity homosexual. He also comes across, interestingly, as a fun person, not at all geeky, and with a practical knack, not just a theoretician.
Near-Mage – comedy gothic adventure game, from an indie studio which really is based in Transylvania. (If you’ve got the address, you might as well make something of it…) I supported this game’s development on Kickstarter because I liked what we could see of the plot (the premise being that Illy discovers she has witch blood and enrols in the Transylvania Institute of Magick), the artwork (with numerous possibilities for customising Illy’s clothing and myriad background characters lounging, strolling or flying through each scene) and the gameplay (several different ways to solve each problem, and the possibility of casting any of Illy’s entire repertoire of spells in each case). The game certainly fulfiled its promise on all of these fronts, though I was disappointed to find it highly linear in its storyline; in fact, in the second half of the game, Illy has no choice about her course at all, being directed to her next task as soon as the previous one is completed through a message delivered by a flying mitzkin. At this point, it started to feel more like a visual novel than an adventure game. However, considered as a visual novel I think it is a good one, with a decent plot, very rich and stylish environments, and truly excellent voice acting (I can’t recall another game in which the minor characters are played so well).
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