News from Nowhere

Say what you will about the Eurovision song contest, it does not lose its ability to surprise.

We watched the finals on Saturday; we did not watch the semi-finals, feeling that four hours of Eurovision froth was quite enough for us. In fact, I don't need more than three hours, and went to bed after the songs; durham_rambler is made of sterner stuff, and stayed on through the voting. The favourite won, which I always find disappointing.

Israel, having won their semi-final, came 5th, and I have no idea how to interpret that. The contest is in theory apolitical, but there are few things as political as an institution which makes a point of being apolitical, so it was inevitable that the Israeli presence would cause a fuss. Their initial entry, October Rain was rejected as too political, but a revised version was accepted: it starts with an appeal to "Writer of my symphony" rather than "Writers of the history", and declares that "I'm still broken from this hurricane" instead of "I'm still wet from this october rain", which looks to me like a case of censorship forcing the writer to come up with something better, but what do I know? Inevitably, it allowed Eurovision to claim that it had taken a stand, but did not satisfy the people calling for Israel to be excluded (for what it's worth, I'd rather see an end to arms sales than a cultural boycott, but never mind). What was unexpected was that the Netherlands should manage to get themselves excluded instead (no apparent connection, although the atmosphere can't have helped cool things down, to say the least...).

Some years I become partisan about one particular song, but not this year. On the other hand, there was one piece of staging I found both absolutely dazzling and completely baffling, and would have loved to see again. My plan was to use the official participants listing to revisit that, and a number of other details. Well, up to a point. The list is a wonderful resource (especially as a source of lyrics) but the official videos it offers are, for better or worse, not the competition performances. For those, I'd presumably have to replay the whole show - and that is not going to happen. Some random thoughts, then, which turn out to be even more random than I expected:

The entry I would have liked to see again was Ukraine, who made extensive use of background images wrapped around the two singers, on walls and floor. Their official video is much more restrained, and doesn't really cast any light on the mystery. Instead it plays up the duality of their song Teresa & Maria ("Mother Teresa and Diva Maria" - oh dear!), performed by two solo performers brought together for the occasion, one to deliver the classic Eurovision big ballad, one to rap in counterpoint (I find rapping much improved by being delivered in a Slav language).

On the other hand, Norway's official video does make some connection between the stage performance (for which I was proposing a special I didn't see that coming award) and the lyrics as given in translation:

I was a very fine and beautiful maiden
With an evil stepmother. My mother had died.

She transformed me into a sword and a needle
And sent me off to the King’s estate.

The wrath of my stepmother grew
When all the fine people loved me most.

She gave me the hide of a grey wolf
And forced me to go into the woods alone.

And I would never be whole and good
Before I had drunk of my brother’s blood.

The stage show seemed to depict a ship in a storm at sea: there was water everywhere. But the video suggests a wild storm whipping up a peaceful lake, around a witchy central figure (Ireland also entered a witch, so perhaps witches are having a moment). The band's name, Gåte, means 'riddle' (according to Wikipedia), which figures.

The song features a nyckelharpa, which makes Norway runners up in the most obscure instrument category. The winners, though, were Estonia, who had something which I think is a talharpa. Like Ukraine, they also went for two bands appearing as one, with a song - I discover from the lyrics - about a drugs bust. Also, with so many performers wearing nothing but a few sequins, you have to applaud a band of blokes in big full-length black coats.

On the night, I interpreted Armenia's entry as another piece of dualism, the woman in a miniskirt version of traditional dress singing her 'modern' pop at - rather than to - the male instrumentalist who played in a more traditional style. Their video brings them both together in an over-the-top version of a tourist board advertisement. You could compare it, as a tongue-in-cheek version of traditional (peasant) life, with Croatia's official video in which Baby Lasagne (probably the best band name - sorry, Finland's Windows95man) plays the country boy leaving the farm. I coveted Baby Lasagne's waistcoat, not the one in the video, but the one he wears for rehearsals and performance, a fancy embroidered version of traditional national costume as saved for best.

Finally: since I've talked about the inscrutability of some of the staging, I should add that if there were a prize for most transparent staging, which there isn't, it would go to the UK. With the subtlety for which we are famous, we apparently recognised that Eurovision is a very gay event, and put Tom of Finland in charge of the choreography. We came in 18th, beating Estonia, who finished twentieth, which is what usually happens to my favourites.

The Carol Evening last Sunday went well. The mulled wine that I had left to mature after breakfast was pronounced the best yet by several different people: so, for the record, Banrock Station shiraz mataro and heavy on the (fresh root) ginger. A slightly altered seating arrangement meant that GirlBear was in the middle of the musicians and had a slightly different view to her usual, and when I grabbed the seat by the door (so I could slip out after Down in Yon Forest to put mince pies in the oven and refresh the mulled wine) I was just at her shoulder and could enjoy this. Some of the usual singers had carelessly absented themselves, and one had to withdraw at the last minute with covid: we have been doing this for 40 years, so we are always conscious of absent friends. But A is still finding copies of the songbook in which she has not yet corrected the spelling and punctuation. At the Winter Songs concert boybear had asked me how old was Il est né, and I had looked it up. The initial response, of course, is "We learned it at school," but now we were able to add a proper provenance, that it was first published in a nineteenth century collection of Christmas songs from Lorraine (which doesn't actually go much further than "Nobody knows!") As we say each year: always different, always the same!

On Monday we celebrated durham_rambler's mother's centenary: for many years, trying to allocated our Christmas visits among three sets of parents, we would spend her birthay with her, a week ahead of Christmas Day (I'm not sure she ever found this an entirely adequate substitute for spending Christmas with them, but better than nothing): this year we met with those members of the family not detained by work (his brother, sister-in-law and nieces) at the cemetery where durham_rambler's parents' ashes are interred on the margins of the memorial to his illustrious relative; after which we adjourned again to the home of Younger Niece, who had prepared a lunch which would remind us of her grandmother (she had not recognised durham_rambler's suggestion of banana custard, and prouced a very elegant cream, in the manner of a fancy restaurant deconstructing a familiar dish).

In the evening we went with the Bears to Unity Folk Club, which is where we learned to sing Deck us all with Boston Charlie. C. startled me by singing A Sailor Courted a Farmer’s Daughter (what Mainly Norfolk describes as Dominic Behan's version): why was this song which no-one else seemed to recognise so very familiar to me? (Mainly Norfolk blames Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor, which means I knew it very well more than 50 years ago). It's a very supportive club, and wedid actually take up our turns on the singaround: since we had had some (political) parodies of Christmas carols, I, with the help of boybear sang Hark the jelly babies sing..., and durham_rambler with the help of the assembled company, sang The Man who Waters the Workers' Beer and Alex Glasgow's Socialist ABC.

What did we do on Tuesday and Wednesday? A little light shopping: guided by GirlBear, we went to Kentish Town, to the Phoenicia Food Hall and the Owl Bookshop, and then to the Wellcome Collection, whose gift shop filled the last few gaps in my Christmas present list. We had planned to meet boybear at the East West restaurant which serves various Indian inflected pizzas; I wasn't sure about this, but the Bears recommended it. Anyway, it was closed, so we crossed the road and ate Thai instead, which was fine. Back at our flat, durham_rambler and I caught up with an episode of Only Connect which delighted me by including a reference to Peter Dickinson in a sequence of fictional detectives (his was the difficult first one, which you aren't supposed to recognise, and I didn't, until we reached 'the second son of the fifteenth Duke of Denver' whom none of the contestants identified).

Wednesday was mainly packing. Lunch with Bears, an evening of tapas with helenraven in Southwark. High points, catching up with helenraven, fishy rice, excellent wine (Montsant,adjacent to Priorat); low point, spilling a glass of said wine over myself (and the table, but luckily no-one else).

And yesterday we left London via Waltham Cross, where we had coffee with A. Now we are in Ely, with D. and valydiarosada. Not going anywhere right now, just lazing with crosswords and internet, watching the wild muntjac deer browsing in the garden, being looked after by our hosts.

We watched the new season of Good Omens -

We try not to use Amazon if we can help it, but they had something that durham_rambler wanted, and when he bought it, they offered him free postage and a trial month of Amazon Prime. Which we used, of course, to watch Good Omens.

What I thought of it is complicated, so I won't go into that here. Instead, here's a question. In the final episode, the (very junior) angel Muriel discovers books. Did I really hear them say something like "Books. Like people, only portable."

It's such a great line, I've been trying to track down the exact wording, and authorship (can I assume script is by Neil Gaiman unless otherwise stated?) but without success. Ask a search engine about 'books people portable' and it will offer to sell you books. Add the information that this is a quotation from Good Omens, and it will try to sell you books like Good Omens. As if. I found a whole compilation of clips of Muriel being adorable, but it doesn't include this line. I'd think I dreamed it, but it's too good.

The internet has a massive amound of information about Good Omens, but I have just dragged myself out of that rabbit hole, and I'm not going to risk going in again. So if anyone knows the answer, please tell!

This line from the Moldovan entry pretty much summarises what I look for in the Eurovision song contest, and this year's edition offered plenty of it. There were other themes, too. Commentator Graham Norton described the show as "the great Italian shirt-shortage of 2022," and he had a point, there were indeed a number of bare-chested males on display. In the interests of balance, though, I should also note that Spain managed to secure third place by sending their (female) singer out skirtless (and yes, removing her jacket in the course of the song). There were several very emotional men, a category in which I include the UK entry, unmemorable but apparently not embarrassing. Estonia was a cowboy, and Iceland were cowgirls. The obligatory WTF moment was provided by Norway's contribution Give That Wolf A Banana, undermined by my strong suspicion that they were Doing It On Purpose. Here's the beginning of their biography:

Subwoolfer, the biggest band in the galaxy, got together 4.5 billion years ago on their home planet… the Moon.

Since then, Keith and Jim have conquered the music scene on every other planet, making them the most successful pop group ever… so they tell us.

( Back to the folklore... )

We had hoped that F and C would join us for the evening, as we are compatible in matters Eurovisual: but C messaged to say that F had caught Covid, so that didn't happen. The pandemic may be over, but people who are being relatively cautious are still catching the virus, and the potential long-term effects are bad enough that I find this worrying. Get well soon, F!

I have admitted before that although we are apending our evenings in front of the television, mostly we are not watching the much-praised dramas (unless they are based on the work of Ann Cleeves). We watch a lot of Pointless with Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman; we dip into Richard Osman's House of Games; and we have just watched the three installments of Alexander Armstrong's trip to Iceland. You will think that I am obsessed with these two presenters, and I will reply that no, it is the television which is obsessed with them.

My true obsession, and the reason I am posting about this, appears in that film about Iceland, in which Xander visits Heimaey:



Speed through to about 25 minutes in, just after the break, for the visit to the wildlife rescue center, and the puffins - Including the briefest blink-and-you've-missed-it film of puffins zipping about in the water.

Then they cut away to fuss over the Beluga whales. Some people have no taste.

Which sounds like a contradiction in terms: but I don't think it was just me. Possibly it was an effect of covid. The audience was as crazy as ever, and didn't look any more spaced out: it was one of a series of experimental and highly-monitored events, and there my have been fewer people there than usual (I think this was mentioned) but I wouldn't have guessed. The Icelandic entry was represented by a film of their rehearsal performance, since one of the band had tested positive and they were self-isolating in their hotel: durham_rambler voted for them regardless, though this may in part have been out of appreciation for their entry last year, which was odd and quirky and deserved to win. This year's entry was pleasant enough, but I don't come to the Eurovision Song Contest for "pleasant enough", I come for those moments of bewilderment, of WTF? of "did I just see what I think I saw?" and no, didn't get many of those this year.

Perhaps the Russian entry - the staging, not the song. The format is not a fair test of a song, because it usually takes a few repetitions to hook me - but there's usually at least one song I can recall as long as the start of the voting. Not this year. There was a lot of rap-inflected, rhythmic stuff, which may go some way to explain it. The Russian entry (Russian Woman, though the singer comes from Tadjikistan) alternated this sort of chanting with something anthemic (is it, in fact, a national anthem? if not, someone should claim it!). The official video is only a faint echo of the staged production, in which the singer in her red boiler suit emerges, not from a mere oversized dress but from a rigid construction, as if she were hatching from a giant matrioushka doll. She doesn't seem to have won many votes for her impeccable feminist message; nor did the Netherlands for their Birth of a New Age, which I thought more melodic than most - and gave brownie points for being partly in Sranan Tongo, a language of Suriname.

I liked the Ukrainian entry, too, which combines Ukrainian folklore and electronics, it says here. Again, the official video goes beyond the stage setting, which I preferred: its unreality had charm, while the realism of the video falls into the uncanny valley - for me, at any rate.

I didn't stay up for the voting, but durham_rambler did, and was able to tell me, when he came to bed, that Italy, the favourite, had won, that France had come second (by channeling Edith Piaf) and that the UK had scored our traditiopnal nul points. All very sober and sensible...

In the virtual absence of a social life, I continue to entertain myself by watching a lot of Pointless and by reading a lot: sometimes these two things converge.

A little while ago, a round on Pointless required contestants to complete proverbs and saying about love (this post was not intended as a Saint Valentine's special, but if you'd like to view it in that light, be my guest). None of them was able to supply the 'best' (lowest scoring) answer on the board, it is not possible to love and be --, and neither could host Alexander Armstrong. No, agreed Richard Osman, I'd never heard it either.

Wait a minute, isn't he supposed to be a crime writer? And to read a lot of crime fiction? How can he not know Josephine Tey's To Love and be Wise?



Reminded of the book, I wanted to re-read it; and re-reading it, I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to post something here to say so. But part of that enjoyment was precisely the pleasure of the re-read, of seeing how thoroughly the author prepares the resolution of her mystery. It would be unkind to spoiler the first-time reader of what genuinely is a mystery, that "more or less" on the cover notwithstanding.

Alan Grant, Tey's recurring detective, is called in to investigate the disappearance of a young man has inserted himself into the community of artistic incomers in an English country village, and then vanished. The publisher's "more or less" reflects the absence of a body, but also the witty and light-hearted atmosphere of the book: it is posible that something terrible has takrn place, but it is also possible that it hasn't. The cover is not an accurate depiction of any one scene but it is not a misrepresentaation either: a shoe fished from the river is produced as a clue, a ballet dancer offers as a reasonable alibi that a sequence of steps occurred to him so he tried them out, just there, beside the river (the characterisation is, I admit, on the broad side at times).

What I would like to be talking about is that this book was published in 1950, and yet it does this thing (and also several other things, but this thing in particular) which it would be a massive spoiler to reveal. Which makes this post a bit pointless.

This week's offering in the film club series was The Band Wagon, a 1953 musical in which Fred Astaire's dancing comes very close to being overshadowed by Comden and Green's script.

Is such a thing possible? It has some classic Astaire dances - though I prefer the unexpected partnership with (real-life, apparently) shoeshine man Leroy Daniels in Shine on your shoes (fuller story here, but ad-heavy website or digested version, easier on the eyes) to the romantic stroll in Central Park with Cyd Charisse, or indeed the grand finale of the 'jazz ballet' Girl Hunt (because, and I'm sorry to repeat myself, but we have seen this in Singing in the Rain, and personally I find it a better fit for Gene Kelly's style). But when I think of The Band Wagon I think of it as an ensemble piece. It's about the pleasure of hanging out with Oscare Levant and Nanette Fabray as the husband and wife creative team into which Comden and Green (who were a purely creative pairing) transform themselves, and about the whole Hey, kids, why don't we do the show right here in the barn! spirit of the theatre.

It's a commonplace of the genre, of course, that if your musical is about the production of a musical, then any song or dance that can't be fitted into the narrative (I stop short of calling it a plot) of the outer musical can be palmed off as a number within the inner musical, which isn't obliged to make sense. The Band Wagon stretches this convention further than most. For one thing, it actually offers us a storyline for the show-within-a-show: in fact, it offers not one but two stories. There is the frothy comedy as pitched by the Martons, in which Tony (Astaire) plays a writer of children's books who moonlights as a crime writer, but feels guilty about it - and at a stretch you could link the 'triplets' and 'private eye' numbers to this framework, though perhaps not the 'Louisiana Hayride'. It goes further, and applies the same logic to the title: the movie we are watching is called The Band Wagon because the show the characters are putting on is called The Band Wagon. But why is that show called The Band Wagon? Ah, that's the mystery, especially as the title appears to be equally applicable to the light-hearted song-and-dance show and the melodramatic Faustian shocker.

Why, I wonder, did they not call the film after the big ensemble number, That's Entertainment? That title wasn't taken, and it picks up on the central argument of the story: what is entertainment? Can theatrical prodigy Jeffrey Cordova, currently starring in his own hit production of Oedipus Rex bring his magic touch to the Martons light-hearted musical comedy? Can the thinly disguised Fred Astaire dance with ballerina Gabrielle Gerard; and she wih him? Why yes, says Jack Buchanan's Cordova, there is no chasm between high and low culture, it's all entertainment. I love this assertion, and the big disappointment of the film is that it doesn't deliver on it: Gabrielle Gerard comes fown from her pointes, Cordova's production is a spectacular flop at the out-of-town try-outs, and the show can only be rescued by reverting to the original plan. It isn't clear whether the Faust versinn is bad in itself (though there are hints that this is the case) or whether leaving the audience traumatised is a mark that it has, on its own terms, succeeded. But either way, the assertion is unmistakable: this is not entertainment.

Om. well, you can't have everything.

Autumn is here; the evenings are dark, and often so are the days, overcast and rainy. The mornings are still light, thank goodness, we still wake up to daylight, just about. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The new university year has started, a little later in Durham than elsewhere, and we have not (yet, thankfully) seen the sort of outbreaks of infection among the students that our neighbours in Newcastle have had. But durham_rambler has been digging into the local figures, and thinks that infections in the city are many times higher than those in the rest of the county. A friend who lives in Barnard Castle asks, subtly "Are you being very good about observing the regulations?" and I would love to respond Would you like to meet up? Instead I replied "It's not that we are being good, but we are being cautious..."

New term or no, the Botanic Gardens are still closed, and the head gardener continues to mail out a daily picture. Last week we passed Day 200 (ouch!). Day 203's picture is a view of the car park.

With the new series of Only Connect, Monday is once again quiz night on television - and yes, life is quiet enough that this is a real pleasure. University Challenge sails blithely on with a series which must have been recorded in its entirety before March's lockdown, which I suppose allows the competition to be completed before the contestants are distracted by exaams - but meant that on Mondays Jeremy Paxman told potential entrants for the next series that their Students' Union has details of how to enter. Only Connect was delayed until they had worked out how to slide perspex screens between the three members of each team. Countdown has simply increased the space between Susie Dent and the Dictionary Corner guest. Is either of these precautions sufficient? I don't know, but I hope so, because I am really pleased to see them back.

I have posted before - because life is very repetitive around here - about the pros and cons of lockdown television, with specific reference to Staged, and what I said about that is what I am saying now about the return of the quizzes: "What I am disproportionately grateful for is the recognition that we don't have to wait for the promised new dawn, the 'on the other side' to be creative, that we can still make entertainment, drama or comedy with what resources lockdown allows us. Hey kids, why don't we so the show right here in the barn?"

Not just television: GirlBear sent me this slideshow from the weekend school she and boybear had attended. Look! Live music! Irritatingly short snatches of live music, but all the same, music (including wind instruments):

Last night's TV was Goodbye Christopher Robin. I went into it with a vague sense that it had not been well reviewed, and so without great expectations: on that basis I was not disappointed, it was fine. In fact, Mark Kermode seems to have liked it, but I'm glad I didn't know that ahead of time. But then, my enjoyment of narrative based on a true story is always tempered by the itch to know exactly how much is true. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce paints a childhood of what amounts to parental neglect, and he names the book on which the film is based; Christopher Milne paints a gentler picture in his memoir The Enchanted Places - and while yes, he would, wouldn't he? I'm inclined to accept at least a degree of nuance from his account. My view of the film's truthfulness may be coloured by its opening, a scene in 1941 in which Christopher's parents receive a telegram from the front containing bad news. This is not untrue, but it invites a false perspective on the entire film.

We have also watched three of the six episodes of Staged in which David Tennant and Michael Sheen pay versions of themselves as actors cast in Six Characters in Search of an Author thwarted by lockdown and going through the motions of rehearsing from home (as recommended by Lucy Mangan). It's funny, and meta, and comes in handy bite-sized chunks. I am happy to be entertained by stuff that was produced before the pandemic: I read people who now flinch away from scenes of crowds, or dancing, or social embraces, but no, that doesn't bother me. That was then, this is now. What I am disproportionately grateful for is the recognition that we don't have to wait for the promised new dawn, the 'on the other side' to be creative, that we can still make entertainment, drama or comedy with what resources lockdown allows us. Hey kids, why don't we do the show right here in the barn?