I smoked my last cigarette at 10:30 last night. I cockily screwed up the empty packet and ceremonially cast it into the inky depths of the dustbin. I felt quite pleased with myself and marvellously empowered! I took a deep breath of clean night air and noticed Acrylic-Biff looking at me from the depths of the Rhododenron bush. This is a favorite place, what he gets up to in there I cannot imagine and prefer not to enquire, but if ever I cannot find him that is usually where he is. There was a quality of scepticism in the baleful glare he levelled at me. An unexpressed "Yeah, Right!" hung in the gelid air between us and for an instant I felt the solid wall of my resolve tremble a little.

Undaunted by the curr's misgivings...

Acrylic-bob

Jerry Springer the Opera. BBC2, Saturday 8th Jan 10pm-12 Midnight.

I thought it was low, vulgar, gratuitously offensive and in execrable taste.
I loved every seedy, scandalous second!
The performances were gutsy and punchy and the staging was quite good too. Sadly though, the music and the lyrics were not in any way memorable. It was a performance that owed more to burlesque and pantomime than anything else and, for some reason, put me in mind of medieval mystery plays. As satire and musical theatre it works very well indeed, but as opera it fell flat on it’s a*se, sitting uneasily between the two genres and merely nodding its head in the direction of opera from time to time. I suppose using Actors who can sing,...

Acrylic-bob

I was rooting round on the internet earlier, looking for some indication of the history of the price of crude oil, and I came across a pop-up advertisement which I found puzzling. It said that "x company", had "made twelve stock plays last year, eleven of which were winners".

I find this puzzling and annoying. I had always been under the impression that the whole point of language was to enable us to communicate ideas and meaning in as precise a form as possible. Nowhere is this need for clarity more important than in financial matters, which, god knows, is complicated enough. I fail to see the point of discussing or advertising a financial service in the same terms that one would find in the tabloid press...

Acrylic-bob

A very disappointing evening in front of the box last night, apart from one exception. The BBC showed the last episode of their period drama "North and South" last night. I won't go as far as to say that it was worth the licence fee all by itself but, it came very close. Even a tired old cynic like me could not supress a tear at the superbly acted and beautifully filmed closing scenes. It's not often that the BBC gets it right these days but this was definately one of those occaisions.

What definately wasn't one of those occaisions was the programme which preceded it:" Hard Spell". Take a couple of hundred geeky kids with all the gawky awkwardness, volcanic zits, braces and horrendous specs usually associated...

Acrylic-bob

I have been watching the new BBC1 drama series "North and South" on Sunday evenings. It is surprisingly good. Not much of a story, more a polemic on the evils of Capitalism, but then it was written in the 1850's.

It is the astonishing period detail that I find absorbing. It is easy to transpose a lot of what is shown into Accrington which sheds a little light on the horrible conditions that our forebears had to endure at the hands of unscrupulous mill owners.

It also gives some idea of the appaling gap in living standards enjoyed by the two halves of society. Rivetting stuff.

I may try making a TV review a regular entry.

Acrylic-bob