Broadchurch’s Gauntlet

Broadchurch has been a television programme of quite exceptional brilliance and importance. Any proper analysis would need at least one repeated viewing and so will have to wait for the box set. However a few of the more obvious features can be noted at this point.

Top Telly

I am again indebted to HarpyMarx (http://harpymarx.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/guardians-top-50-television-dramas-of-all-time/) for this list from The Guardian of their Top 50 TV Dramas. Like many others I love a list as long as it is not patently absurd, and this one, although one might disagree with it, is certainly not that. Here is the list…

Bits and Pieces – June 2012

Shostakovich 10

A wonderful performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony by the CBSO under the mesmerising Andris Nelsons. Shostakovich is a site of ideological battle, his music fiercely contested and debated, with every sort of hidden meaning detected which might make it acceptable to anti-communist listeners.

A Collation of Links

This entry is somewhat remarkable in that consists solely of links to other people’s blog entries with almost no discussion or intervention. I do most heartily commend all of the pieces, but admit that it also functions as an easy historical record for me of a period in which I have not blogged.

A Sick Society

The attack on sickness benefits has been going on for a number of years but has been vastly accelerated by the LibCons. This attack is both a personal and political matter for me. It has been brilliantly covered in a number of articles by HarpyMarx which I link to below. I wanted however to both produce a brief guide to the way in which the attacks have proceeded and my own encounters with the system.

Fire and Circuses

Although I do not want to spend all my time looking backwards and I have already offered some thoughts on the past 18 months, I must not overlook some of the best things I have read on the net. It is, after all, from the net, in the form of email, blogs and links to articles, that I both acquire the majority of my information about what is going on in the world, and even more that I read the best of the analysis which inspires and intrigues me.

Crabbe – Tale 15: Advice or, The Squire and The Priest

As we shall see, there is a sense in which this Tale follows on directly from Tale 14 – it too has as a central concern the effects upon a young man of having his conscience awakened. This raises again the question of the way in which certain Tales are grouped and the order in which they are presented; I would certainly suggest that Tales 14 and 15 do need to be considered as, to some degree, complementary. Having said this the milieu and characters, not to mention the outcome, of this story are very different to those of The Struggles of Conscience, and centre on a relationship of which Crabbe must have had considerable personal knowledge.