What I Have Mostly Been Watching

I watched Fern Britton’s interview with Michael Gove yesterday.”Fern Meets” etc.

The religious content usually puts me off this programme, but my curiosity was aroused when I discovered Michael Gove was the subject.

The details of wee Michael’s early life were fascinating, and he came across as a nice man, with a refreshing willingness to admit to his own mistakes and offer (carefully considered) straight answers to some tough questions. This seems to be a fashion embraced by the current crop of political mavericks. 

Of course it could have been a cynical and calculated exercise in personal rehabilitation on his part, (and who could blame him) and I’d love to know who approached whom with the idea of appearing as a guest on what is, after all, a programme that normally features B-list celebrities.

Fern Britton’s ‘listening face’ was a picture. One minute sympathetic, next minute quizzical. Uber-empathy gawn mad.  And what’s that new buzzword? Oh yes, metacognition. (awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes)

Actually I’m not quite sure what “buzzword” means now, so I’ll have to look that up too. 

Ah: 

a word or phrase, often an item of jargon, that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context. 

That’s the one! 

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I’ve been watching Scandi Noirs on BBC Four. Everyone loves a chilling, Scandl noir. One thing’s for sure. Whenever a BAME character shows up in a Scandi Noir, you can discount him/her as the villain. Ethnics and immigrants are always whiter than white. Hideously. (So to speak) 

Scandi Noirs are so leftie and so PC that you can’t help playing a form of P.C. I-Spy instead of enjoying them for their cinematographic artistry. Sometimes they feature predictable sub plots about local politics, where lefty politics either win the day or occupy the moral high ground, while the capitalists and conservatives will be the evil, corrupt bullies. That’s the rule. 

The current Saturday night double-biller is called Modus. The villain is a Christian homophobic cult who set out to terrorise and kill gays. The cult leader is based in the US, but the main action is set in Sweden. There are several sets of heroic gay victims and a certain amount of artistic gay snogging is included.   It also boasts a tedious variety of potentially dangerous situations, known to the viewer but unknown by the most vulnerable character (a child) so that the viewer is in a constant state of anxiety.

The star, as usual, is the location and the snow is as white as ever and I will continue to watch them as long as the BBC puts them on, till they become unbearable.

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рождественские поздравления 

Christmas message to our Russian readers. (a tribute to those inexplicable spikes)

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I’ve been watching “My Mother and Other Strangers’ - BBC One on Sunday evenings, and very enjoyable it has been too. 

A welcome change from those BBC dramas that switch back and forth in time, with plots so convoluted that you don’t understand what’s going on, even at the end, when it’s all supposed to have fallen into place. 

The time I’ve disagreed most with an Andrew Billen review (Times (£) ) was when he praised “The Missing”, which I couldn’t make head or tail of. I couldn’t understand or care less about who anyone was or what was going on, and I thought the casting was terrible as well as the acting. 

Long hair, short hair, burnt neck, not burnt neck; in Iraq one minute, Germany the next, then somewhere else. Probably not the intended response, but I couldn’t help laughing at the girl with panda makeup and the trembling lips. Pathos gawn mad if you ask me.

Not that the abrupt, unresolved  ending of “My Mother “ was entirely satisfactory. I had to check just to make sure that was the end. But the acting was good, especially the wee boys, and the locals were suitably menacing and rustic. Again, the location was the star. You could lose yourself in the nostalgia and follow the plot without straining your brain; just the ticket for Sunday evening.