dom.blog

I’m going to see Have I Got News For You!

Twice!

After Joshua and I mounted a military-precision operation last week to secure tickets from the website (it involved lots of refreshing, several PCs, multiple browsers, pinging, the net connection going down, phoning up the ICT department frantically, and eventually Joshua coming down to my Maths lesson to hurriedly get my phone number) the confirmation has come through.

I’ll be in the company of Merton, Hislop and co on 27th April with Joshua, Sanna and Fabio. And then the very next week (4th May) Joshua and I are going again with our darling mothers. Awww. Credit where credit’s due, it’s my mum who found out about the electronic barriers going up at 11am on that day so all thanks to her really.

So excited! I was terrified it’d get cancelled before this day would come. Now, I wonder if I’ll ever fulfil my secret life ambition to be on the damn show itself… Ah well – keep dreaming!

Saw this George Clooney film at the Tricycle Cinema on Saturday night. It’s about the famous journalist Edward Murrow (who I’d actually never heard of before) and his taking on of the infamous Senator McCarthy who orchestrated the hysterical anti-Communist witch-hunts in 1950s America. Oh, and it’s filmed in black and white – something I got used to surprisingly quickly, but I think that’s cause I’ve watched quite a bit of 1960s Doctor Who

So yes – to be honest, I don’t think this film deserves quite the glowing praise it received – but it is nonetheless very worthy and worth seeing if you’re interested in that period of history. Or current affairs, of course, as the obvious metaphor to the role of the media today… although I couldn’t help feeling incredibly uplifted after watching the film about the role the Internet now plays. It’s no longer a question of a few corporations controlling the ability to get your message out there, although of course they still command the mass audiences, anyone has the ability to publish, at least in many parts of the world. Damn the sponsors, we’ve got Google.

The other organisation that came to my mind was the BBC. The speech bookending the film about the role that television plays is a powerful reminder that in Britain, our culture has been shaped by an organisation that is not dependent on advertising revenue and does uphold a public service ethos (at least some of the time!) to inform, educate and to entertain.

Appropraitely we ran into my History teacher on the way out – he was going to see the later showing. And my other cinema anectode was the labelling of the vanilla ice-cream as ‘natural’. That annoyed me. Why is vanilla any more natural than strawberry or chocolate? Stop the organic-natural-reallyreallygoodforyou-food nonsense soon please.

Also – have just completed my first draft of a rather tricky essay on another era in history – Britain’s role in the Middle East. I read it through and realised I know exactly what the teacher is going to say: too much storytelling! How do you avoid storytelling in an essay that stretches from 1917 to 1956 though?

Good night, and good luck blog readers. This blog post was brought to you by the correct spelling of aluminium.*

*(In the film they say aluminum. Aluminum?!)

For anyone studying a Shakespeare play, I always recommend you go and see a stage performance. So it was great to see Black and White Sextet tonight, a modern adaption of Othello (one review here) which made practical use of modern news reports and mobile phones to help tell the story using abridged dialogue.

The small theatre made the emotion of the play very strong indeed and the ending was very well executed – a no holds barred approach to Desdemona’s nasty death which was far more powerful than a cutaway some larger productions might have been tempted to use. Oh, and Othello chased Iago offstage right past where I was sitting brandishing a sword which made me duck!

My experience was even better than simply watching the play, however, because Richard Earthy (Iago) is a friend of the family so he joined us for a drink afterwards with Fliss Walton (Desdemona) and the young university student in charge of lighting. This was amazingly and very useful as we discussed the play and various interpretations of it. Fliss completely changed my view of the meek Desdemona who was rather feisty and strong in this adaption, which is supported by considerable evidence in the text itself. The same goes for Emelia, Iago’s wife, who was also much stronger than we had imagined when reading in class. Shakespearian women have got guts, it appears.

It was slightly surreal as well. We mingled with Cassio and Emelia. Desdemona bought a round of drinks. Iago got some crisps and talked about his ‘gay wedding’ onstage in one scene with Othello. (See! I was right!) So I feel much closer to these characters now and how cool is that?