How the winter months drag...
Twilight lasts longer at 50 degrees north (Poole) than the continent, the US, Canada, or even Australia. Not as long of course as Scotland, Iceland, or Svalbard. But it still can be trying as the cold dry north winds of this week, and even some snow in Dorset, make us focus on what else might be around to entertain us.
Svalbard is on people’s lips these days, thanks to Sky Atlantic’s mega-series Fortitude. Set in the mythical arctic town of Fortitude, it’s actually filmed in Iceland (complete with extra snow carted in from England in view of the mild Icelandic climate during filming). So far the outstanding feature is the scenery. We are asked to believe that the temperature is around minus 30 degrees. This therefore strains one’s disbelief a bit during some of the obligatory sex scenes. There is outdoor (well, in a shed with the door open) coupling. The big black guy who is the local helicopter pilot seems appropriately dressed in a massive down suit (apart from dropping his trousers) but the attractive Spanish barmaid seems to be risking hypothermia or possibly labiovulval frostbite. Having visited Svalbard I can confirm that residents do carry rifles around with them, but not in downtown Longyearbyen, and I didn’t see any 10 year old girls hefting guns on their shoulders. The plotlines seem a bit ludicrous (Sophie Grabol who is the Governor is desperate to build an ice hotel in the glacier. Has nobody told her that glaciers move?). A little boy has developed a mystery febrile illness which rendered him unconscious. “Nothing rots here” says one character. “It’s a perfect forensic laboratory”. Just as well in view of the grisly murder perpetrated in episode one. But I think he’s referring to the mystery illness. It’s a documented fact that the great flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 killed victims who are buried in the permafrost in Svalbard, but when they exhumed the bodies to try and isolate it the virus irritatingly refused to come to life. Finally the other item which has emerged from the glacier where Sophie longs to build is a partly preserved mammoth. Michael Gambon who is a naturalist photographer with a terminal illness is threatened by the Governor with expulsion if he goes around shouting about his discoveries. “You are not allowed to die here, you know” she tells him. Not true. You can die in Svalbard but you get shipped back to the mainland for burial. Jessica Raine, Christopher Eccleston and others contribute. We await events...
Meanwhile, in the arctic twilight of Poole Lindsay keeps disappearing to watch Silent Witness, where Emilia Fox wrinkles her nose in that attractive way of hers at another grisly discovery, but having started my Charlotte Brontë novel, Shirley, I have preferred to finish it, even if there is quite a bit of literary excess (it may not surprise you that the heroines get married in the end, one of the few ways of ending a novel written by a woman in the first half of the 19th century). Digressing about Shirley for a moment, one of the most remarkable and tragic facts about the novel is that during 1848 and 1849 when Charlotte was writing it, she nursed in succession, her brother Branwell, her sister Emily, and her final remaining sibling Anne, who all died from tuberculosis within the space of nine months. Charlotte survived only another six years.
And we are still in touch with Broadchurch, another mythical town, this time in West Dorset (it is actually West Bay), where David Tennant and Olivia Coleman prove to be the world’s most incompetent detectives. ‘Whose is this mobile number?’ asks DI Hardy (Tennant). Instead of using the full analytic capabilities of the police they muse about it for a whole episode. Like Michael Gambon, David Tennant seems to have a mystery terminal illness which is alluded to but which he never goes for treatment for (come on, I don’t think Dorchester Hospital is that bad). Other viewers have christened it ‘BoredChurch’. However, if you watch it in the right frame of mind it is not boring. One is kept on one’s toes waiting for the next improbable event to occur. A good example: DI Hardy has a previous incompetent case under his belt – a pair of murders. The chief suspect, who got off at the trial, is a man who looks just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry mode (same quiff). He also looks as though he’s been training for a weighlifting contest and spends most of the episodes doing shift work hammering in fence posts on the Dorset coast. Despite this, when the rather unfit looking father of the (previously) murdered girl finds him, he ends up on the ground helpless, getting kicked and punched, when DI Hardy races along the cliffs to his rescue. All characters spend a lot of time on the cliffs or the beach, staring moodily out over Lyme Bay. Even DI Hardy, one night when he can’t sleep wanders up the coast path to the house where the prosecuting counsel lives arriving at some ungodly hour to ask her to write his will for him. Has no one told him that a solicitor costs less than a Queen's counsel?
But there is, or was, hope. Namely, the wonderfully acted series three of Last Tango in Halifax. Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid, Sarah Lancashire, Nicola Walker in top form, and a script which is pared down Yorkshire and blackly funny. We’ve just seen the last episode. Can’t wait for the next series.
Yet more wintertime TV drama is on its way. Indian Summers will be set in Raj India of the 1930s, in Shimla we believe. It will star Julie Walters and is rumoured to be good. J K Rowling’s suburban thriller, The Casual Vacancy, is coming soon. None of this is helping couch potatoes of course, but the target audience is possibly a little different from the standard Soaps such as Eastenders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Holby City, Casualty, etc.
Finally among the recordings waiting in the wings (on the hard disc that is) is the new BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker winning sequence about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. It stars our current greatest actor Mark Rylance as Cromwell. Damian Lewis is Henry. I can’t comment because I am hoping that the twilight lasts long enough to catch up with it. Chuckle news this week is that the intrigues in and around Clarence House (the London home of Prince Charles and Camilla) are such that it is known to insiders as Wolf Hall.
In Poole we are fortunate to have the home of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (yes of course it is the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra but it is based in Poole). I went to the BSO on Wednesday. Very good concert with the programme of: Sibelius Spring tone poem, Grieg piano concerto (by Grieg for those who remember Andre Previn and Morecambe and Wise) played by Alessandro Taverna, 3rd placed in the last Leeds competition. Bit of a heartthrob. I feel that younger females would have been impressed with his attack, lyricism, pianism or some similar attribute. He obligingly played some lovely Chopin as an encore. Rachmaninov Symphonic dances in the second half. The conductor like some policemen looked very young (even younger than Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s principal conductor). His name is Joshua Weilerstein.
So, as Garrison Keillor would say, that’s the news from Poole and I hope you enjoyed this brief Poole Home Companion. If you are in Australia (Kim), the USA (Tod, Alex) or Canada (Clarkson Family) I expect many of these TV adventures are on their way to you and I hope you feel prepared...
In the meantime, enjoy these pictures of Poole this morning. Taken at the RSPB boat trip around Poole Harbour (42 species identified including the very rare black guillemot). See our dramatic snowfall (!) last Tuesday...
Twilight lasts longer at 50 degrees north (Poole) than the continent, the US, Canada, or even Australia. Not as long of course as Scotland, Iceland, or Svalbard. But it still can be trying as the cold dry north winds of this week, and even some snow in Dorset, make us focus on what else might be around to entertain us.
Svalbard is on people’s lips these days, thanks to Sky Atlantic’s mega-series Fortitude. Set in the mythical arctic town of Fortitude, it’s actually filmed in Iceland (complete with extra snow carted in from England in view of the mild Icelandic climate during filming). So far the outstanding feature is the scenery. We are asked to believe that the temperature is around minus 30 degrees. This therefore strains one’s disbelief a bit during some of the obligatory sex scenes. There is outdoor (well, in a shed with the door open) coupling. The big black guy who is the local helicopter pilot seems appropriately dressed in a massive down suit (apart from dropping his trousers) but the attractive Spanish barmaid seems to be risking hypothermia or possibly labiovulval frostbite. Having visited Svalbard I can confirm that residents do carry rifles around with them, but not in downtown Longyearbyen, and I didn’t see any 10 year old girls hefting guns on their shoulders. The plotlines seem a bit ludicrous (Sophie Grabol who is the Governor is desperate to build an ice hotel in the glacier. Has nobody told her that glaciers move?). A little boy has developed a mystery febrile illness which rendered him unconscious. “Nothing rots here” says one character. “It’s a perfect forensic laboratory”. Just as well in view of the grisly murder perpetrated in episode one. But I think he’s referring to the mystery illness. It’s a documented fact that the great flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 killed victims who are buried in the permafrost in Svalbard, but when they exhumed the bodies to try and isolate it the virus irritatingly refused to come to life. Finally the other item which has emerged from the glacier where Sophie longs to build is a partly preserved mammoth. Michael Gambon who is a naturalist photographer with a terminal illness is threatened by the Governor with expulsion if he goes around shouting about his discoveries. “You are not allowed to die here, you know” she tells him. Not true. You can die in Svalbard but you get shipped back to the mainland for burial. Jessica Raine, Christopher Eccleston and others contribute. We await events...
Meanwhile, in the arctic twilight of Poole Lindsay keeps disappearing to watch Silent Witness, where Emilia Fox wrinkles her nose in that attractive way of hers at another grisly discovery, but having started my Charlotte Brontë novel, Shirley, I have preferred to finish it, even if there is quite a bit of literary excess (it may not surprise you that the heroines get married in the end, one of the few ways of ending a novel written by a woman in the first half of the 19th century). Digressing about Shirley for a moment, one of the most remarkable and tragic facts about the novel is that during 1848 and 1849 when Charlotte was writing it, she nursed in succession, her brother Branwell, her sister Emily, and her final remaining sibling Anne, who all died from tuberculosis within the space of nine months. Charlotte survived only another six years.
And we are still in touch with Broadchurch, another mythical town, this time in West Dorset (it is actually West Bay), where David Tennant and Olivia Coleman prove to be the world’s most incompetent detectives. ‘Whose is this mobile number?’ asks DI Hardy (Tennant). Instead of using the full analytic capabilities of the police they muse about it for a whole episode. Like Michael Gambon, David Tennant seems to have a mystery terminal illness which is alluded to but which he never goes for treatment for (come on, I don’t think Dorchester Hospital is that bad). Other viewers have christened it ‘BoredChurch’. However, if you watch it in the right frame of mind it is not boring. One is kept on one’s toes waiting for the next improbable event to occur. A good example: DI Hardy has a previous incompetent case under his belt – a pair of murders. The chief suspect, who got off at the trial, is a man who looks just like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry mode (same quiff). He also looks as though he’s been training for a weighlifting contest and spends most of the episodes doing shift work hammering in fence posts on the Dorset coast. Despite this, when the rather unfit looking father of the (previously) murdered girl finds him, he ends up on the ground helpless, getting kicked and punched, when DI Hardy races along the cliffs to his rescue. All characters spend a lot of time on the cliffs or the beach, staring moodily out over Lyme Bay. Even DI Hardy, one night when he can’t sleep wanders up the coast path to the house where the prosecuting counsel lives arriving at some ungodly hour to ask her to write his will for him. Has no one told him that a solicitor costs less than a Queen's counsel?
But there is, or was, hope. Namely, the wonderfully acted series three of Last Tango in Halifax. Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid, Sarah Lancashire, Nicola Walker in top form, and a script which is pared down Yorkshire and blackly funny. We’ve just seen the last episode. Can’t wait for the next series.
Yet more wintertime TV drama is on its way. Indian Summers will be set in Raj India of the 1930s, in Shimla we believe. It will star Julie Walters and is rumoured to be good. J K Rowling’s suburban thriller, The Casual Vacancy, is coming soon. None of this is helping couch potatoes of course, but the target audience is possibly a little different from the standard Soaps such as Eastenders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Holby City, Casualty, etc.
Finally among the recordings waiting in the wings (on the hard disc that is) is the new BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker winning sequence about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. It stars our current greatest actor Mark Rylance as Cromwell. Damian Lewis is Henry. I can’t comment because I am hoping that the twilight lasts long enough to catch up with it. Chuckle news this week is that the intrigues in and around Clarence House (the London home of Prince Charles and Camilla) are such that it is known to insiders as Wolf Hall.
In Poole we are fortunate to have the home of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (yes of course it is the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra but it is based in Poole). I went to the BSO on Wednesday. Very good concert with the programme of: Sibelius Spring tone poem, Grieg piano concerto (by Grieg for those who remember Andre Previn and Morecambe and Wise) played by Alessandro Taverna, 3rd placed in the last Leeds competition. Bit of a heartthrob. I feel that younger females would have been impressed with his attack, lyricism, pianism or some similar attribute. He obligingly played some lovely Chopin as an encore. Rachmaninov Symphonic dances in the second half. The conductor like some policemen looked very young (even younger than Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s principal conductor). His name is Joshua Weilerstein.
So, as Garrison Keillor would say, that’s the news from Poole and I hope you enjoyed this brief Poole Home Companion. If you are in Australia (Kim), the USA (Tod, Alex) or Canada (Clarkson Family) I expect many of these TV adventures are on their way to you and I hope you feel prepared...
In the meantime, enjoy these pictures of Poole this morning. Taken at the RSPB boat trip around Poole Harbour (42 species identified including the very rare black guillemot). See our dramatic snowfall (!) last Tuesday...
 |
| Quite a contrast at Poole Quay |
 |
| The new fast trimaran |
 |
| Poole Harbour Entrance & Black Guillemot (see below) |
 |
| Honest! It's a Black Guillemot |
 |
| The massive Dorset snowfall of February 3rd 2015 |
 |
| Dorset snow! |
Goodbye for now... all downhill from here!
