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