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Floating in Mid-Air

Since my first Eurovision party in 2004, with its memorable Ukrainian winner, I’ve only watched the final every few years. There have been some good songs and performances along the way, but not many from the UK. So when I caught the tail-end of the first semifinal on Tuesday and the rest of it the next day, I was left wondering if this year’s entry was any good. When I heard it, I was stunned to realise that the UK actually had a shot at winning for the first time in twenty years.

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15 May 2022

Get Back

I watched the last part of Get Back on Sunday, after working through the others during the week an hour or two at a time. By then I’d already reached the point where I didn’t want it to end, and an eight-hour cut felt too short. The first instalment at Twickenham was sometimes uncomfortable (seeing Paul belittle George without realising he had, and what followed), but the second restored the balance, with moments of pure joy in its final hour: the sense of what good friends they really were, and what good people they all, at the bottom of it, even on the cusp of the band’s dissolution, were, was profoundly moving. The full rooftop performance in Part Three only cemented that impression.

I spent the summer that I turned twenty-one obsessed with Mark Lewisohn’s newly released The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, and this has taken me right back to it: somehow all of their genius and personalities have been captured in these few weeks of fly-on-the-wall recordings and what Peter Jackson has been able to do with them. A wonderful artifact.

Get Back reviewed. On the trail of Get Back. Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ farewell. Why we’ll keep watching it forever.

7 December 2021

Conspicuous Consumption III: Time is Meaningless

Five months since the last instalment of this supposedly monthly series means that there’s a lot of music, movies and TV to catch up on. Catching up on movies and TV—if not music—seemed to be all that half the population was doing in lockdown, but with two school-age kids at home I didn’t have much time for box-set bingeing. I watched a few movies with them, though.

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6 September 2020

Conspicuous Consumption II: Covid Edition

Time for a quick update on listening and viewing since part one.

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31 March 2020 · 1 Comment

Conspicuous Consumption

After being so lax with keeping track of movies and music here last year, I thought I’d try posting every month about what’s passed across my audio-visual radar. Then the end of January came and went, and I thought I’d make it bi-monthly instead. Welcome to Conspicuous Consumption, an occasional series for 2020.

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29 February 2020 · 1 Comment

The Ministry of Housinge

David Allen Green wrote recently on the conceptual problem of the TV licence, which is under attack by the government as a way of punishing the BBC for its lack of ideological fervour for Brexit. The licencing scheme is certainly problematic, and when I first moved here I couldn’t see why the UK kept it over a system of funding via general taxation. But the Tories are contemplating a model of private subscriptions, not general taxation, and a flat tax licence is better than starving the BBC to death. What a miserable prospect a Britain with no Beeb would be.

28 February 2020