Review of the Year 2021

Bit late for a review of the year but whilst there may be a tradition about these things there is not, to my mind, a rule that says January 20th is too late. Anyway I've been busy.

Annually, I find the same problem. Things I discovered in a particular year were often published before then. So, trying to keep it all vaguely contemporary, here are the arts and culture stuff I enjoyed most in 2021:

Television

Having someone culturally aware come and live with us was helpful and top of the incoming list was our discovery of Succession. If you've missed it then Brian Cox (actor not physicist) plays Logan Roy, a hugely successful businessman trying to stop his dysfunctional offspring from inheriting and ruining his empire. Very sweary. Three seasons available.

If major infrastructure programmes have a fringe benefit it is that they let loose the ubiquitous Alice Roberts to share details of archaeological discoveries under the road, pipeline, railway. Digging for Britain ensued and educated this household muchly. In the same vein, plaudits to BBC2's Stonehenge - The Lost Circle Revealed and the archaeology of back gardens disclosed in The Great British Dig.

Mobeen Azhar's Hometown - A Killing started as a podcast but became a BBC docu-series. Investigative journalism at its best.

I continue to be a sucker for food shows such as Great British Menu, Masterchef and Professional Masterchef. The celebrity versions of these shows can go hang, though. In fact I enjoyed most shows where people demonstrate brilliance at something I can't do, so stand up and take a bow Pottery Throwdown, Bake Off and Great British Sewing Bee.

Clarkson's Farm surprised me by being educational.

Ghosts continued to be lovely and very clever.

Gone Fishing was nice slow tele. Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have delivered public service broadcasting gold.

Music

Squid promised much with their first few singles. Their debut album Bright Green Field was only three stars from me but the blending of maths rock and shouty punk was a fine mash-up and continues to promise much.

Jangly guitar fans could get their fix with The War on Drugs - I Don't Live here Anymore. Album of the year.

For joyful story-telling pop my guilty pleasure was Demi Lovato's Dancing with the Devil ... The Art of Starting Over.

Honourable mentions for Floating Points collaboration with the LSO on Promises.

Twitter

Henry Sotheran Ltd is an antiquarian bookshop, which I will probably never frequent because of money and that but @Sotherans is a delight of a Twitter feed. Sample:

'...we've been around longer, on average, than most empires last. We sell old books and other stuff but mostly books, and definitely not opium anymore because it got banned. Wednesdays are not for talking.'

Films

The Trial of the Chicago Seven was a favourite. Bond a bit disappointing. Didn't see enough as cinemas felt unsafe.

Podcasts

Lost Hills told the story of an apparently random killing in more detail than the cops seemed to have gone into with Dana Goodyear finding out more and more connections and coincidences. From Pushkin.

Books

My wokeness was polished a little by How Not to be Wrong - The Art of Changing Your Mind by James O'Brien.

Good novels included Catriona Ward's Last House on Needless Street - a murder mystery that pulled all the rugs from under both your feet at various times. Very diverting and more than a little odd.

What happens once the easternmost house falls into the sea? Juliet Blaxland's follow-up is a bit more metaphysical, but also keeping alive the stories of those who will crumble next in The Easternmost Sky.

Alice Roberts' (her again) pre-history of Britain in seven burials is exactly that. Who should live in Britain? Who came first? Who are we? Read Ancestors and stop hating immigrants.

Food

Pintxo (tapas) and Appleton's (fine dining) in Fowey made a holiday in this country great. Pony Bistro in Bedminster delivered everything you'd expect a Josh Eggleton enterprise to do (including a Valentine's finish-at-home meal in a box). For tapas in Bristol try Gambas on Wapping Wharf.

Good pubs included Bedminster's North Street Standard, The Salamander in Bath, WB at Wapping Wharf, The Priory at Portbury and Coates House, Nailsea.

Art

We enjoyed wandering around Bedminster's street art festival Upfest and being under the Moon in Bristol Cathedral.

That's about it. I've saved you from the format 'Stuff I found this year that everyone else has known about for ever', which would have included an updated review of experimental German electronica from the early 70s which I'd miss-dissed. Belated apologies to Faust, Can and Amon Düül II. Although for some reason I always liked Tangerine Dream.

Thought for the Day

As presented at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

Delighted that Cameron Balloons in Bristol have been chosen to make a special balloon for Blue Peter's 60th Anniversary. I have a Blue Peter badge which I won for being a runner up in a Christmas competition - a few years ago.

I'm wearing it today alongside another symbol.

Actually I may be wearing my sister's badge. We found it when clearing Mum's flat and it could belong to either of us. She let me keep it.

It is a sign of being part of a club. A precious club which now has three generations of followers and fans.

It's a few years since I was at vicar school. It was a great experience but things could all get a bit serious. Friend of mine had a great antidote to people getting over-earnest. He'd turn up next day wearing his Dennis the Menace fan club T-shirt and badge. The St John's College Common Room subscribed to the quality daily newspapers, the Church press and the Beano.

Badges are important. The earliest Christian symbol was a fish - because the Greek word for fish - ichthus -also spells out the initials of Iesu Christos Theos 'Uios Soterios -Jesus Christ God Son Saviour.

Some Christians still wear fish symbols or have them on their cars. I suppose it makes sure your driving is a good witness.

But many Christians also wear a cross - it reminds us of Jesus; specifically his death. That's the other one I have on today.

What badges do you wear? And what is the deeper truth behind them? For a badge is a sign or symbol of belonging. Belonging to the club of Jesus followers is my most important badge. Blue Peter means a lot to me; the cross means everything.

What Would You Have Done?

I know you like these occasional little tales told against myself so here goes. Tell me if you would have done the same and if you would have noticed sooner.

Last night I returned home from the Standing Committee at about 10.15, poured myself a glass of wine at the end of a long first day back at work after holidays, and sat down to watch the end of the Germany vs Algeria game.

My lovely and generous wife, off to bed, changed the TV channels to the football (how cool is that?) and I observed that there were about 25 minutes left. The score was 0-0. It seemed end-to-end and exciting. The game was good, although it slowed a little, and the referee blew for what I thought was full time. The commentator said, 'Back to Adrian and the boys.'

I expected extra time but it became apparent that it was half-time not full-time. The boys were preparing to discuss the first half, after the inevitable ITV break.

During the advertisements I checked the kick-off time in my little, battered Guardian World Cup guide that I took to Gozo and back (sad eh?) and saw that the match had been due to start at 9 not 10. I wondered (are you there yet?) if some of the references to weather conditions I had vaguely picked up had led to a late start. Or maybe crowd trouble or transport problems

Then, about three adverts in, a blank screen with this message:

This content is not available on ITV+1. Please turn to ITV.

ITV+1. Oh bollocks.

After a short break the adverts continued then the panel came up and began to discuss the first half and it struck me. I had just watched the end of the first half on ITV+1, the channel my wife had accidentally tuned to. Her generosity and loveliness dipped a little.

Dilemma. The game is now over. I have missed the second half. But if it ended 0-0 I can save having to watch a dull second half and jump straight to extra time and maybe penalties. But if it has not ended 0-0 I'll have missed the possibility of watching the Germans lose.

I opted to keep watching +1, knowing that extra time would see me going to bed pretty late and penalties - well you know. Amazingly I had not looked at Twitter the whole time so decided I couldn't, obviously, do that either - even if the game was dull.

So that is why I am late with my homework for today's meeting, slept until 8.00 a.m. for the first time in a million years, and, apparently, can't type anymore.

Of course the Germans won. They woke up. Wish I could.

Eurovision 2014

So here is our voting system honed after hours of discussion and years of experience:

Possible plus points:

Musicality
General style
National identity
Great hairstyles
Costume change
Strange instrument
Ice skating/juggling etc
AOB

Possible negative points:

Backing vocal better than lead
Spotted not playing instrument whilst sound continues
Gratuitous eye candy
Fake tears
Smoke/mirrors etc
Children and/or animals
AOB

Off

When it is a fine day I feel some sense of an urge to get out and enjoy the lovely part of the world where I live. But the tilley is a timid creature that prefers the indoors and so is delighted, on return from the gym followed by the odd bit of provision shopping, to have an excuse to lock the door and do the ironing whilst catching up on a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad (on season four), last night's football, a movie and some new music. Also to find time to do a bit of piano practice. And maybe supper out.

New music is the newest Steve Mason album, which I bought having heard him live last November, called Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time. Incredibly good.

I enjoyed Wolf People's Fain and so I raided their back catalogue and got hold of Steeple from 2010. Fain felt a bit Wishbone Ashy with lyrics from Traffic's all-dance-round-a-stone-circle-during-a-solstice period. Steeple has a track which is pure Jethro Tull but none the worse for that.

Time for an episode of The News Room before bed.

That was how I spent my time off this week.

Overhearing

Sometimes I join in conversations in the gym changing rooms but there is a particular bunch of people who brandish views so extremely stupid that I stay quietly in the corner, overhearing. I should have recorded this one from Monday morning. I have done my best with the transcription below. We'll call them Harry and Ron.

Harry: Who won that Sports Personality of the Year last night?

Ron: I don't know. I never watch it.

Harry: I know what you mean. It goes on for ever and then they wheel out a load of old has-beens like Ted Dexter.

Ron: It's all gone too American with that keeping you waiting until they announce the winner.

Harry: Trouble with the BBC is it's all run by lefties. They're either commies or socialists.

Ron: Do you ever watch Al Jazeera?

Harry: No.

Ron: You ought to. If you've got Freeview it's on about 82 or thereabouts. It's Arab but I'll say this for them, they give both sides. Not like the bloody BBC.

Harry. Did you see that thing about the university wanting to allow segregated seating.

Ron: Yeah but Cameron's come out against that.

Harry: I read the Daily Mail and I tell you what, it makes me want to cut my throat some mornings.

I write fiction sometimes. I wouldn't have dared make this up.

Quote Book Index 581-590

The wonderful P.J.O'Rouke is a funny Republican for the right reasons, thus I laugh with him not at him. This from the book with the best sub-title I know:

The lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death

586 ...we could see a refugee squatter camp... These people were not ... starving to death. Their misery had not quite reached the photogenic stage.
(All the Trouble in the World, 1994)

On Criticism

I found myself, though no fault of my own, watching Strictly and Xfactor last night. It was horrid.

One observation. The panels of judges in both programmes know something about the subject they are critiquing. Why, in both cases, are they so hated if they offer suggestions for improvement? Most of the acts nod in acknowledgement. Why do the audience boo?

When Craig Revel Horwood enjoys a routine but suggests some correction of posture or hand positioning he is booed. When Gary Barlow applauds a singer but points out pitching issues in verse 1 (I like 'pitching issues' for what we would call 'out of tune') the audience goes mad at him.

We seem to want our developing stars to be fully formed and unmentored. Even the babies. How do you learn without comments?

I suppose the good cop bad cop routine and falling-out-judges makes for good tele but I can't help feeling that giving the impression that every piece of advice that is not encouraging is somehow wrong is, well, wrong.

We used to run a summer camp and each day would review the performance of everyone at everything the day before. One sign of growth as a Christian leader was the ability to sit in the meeting and hear feedback on your talk/music/game-leading/cooking. Those who listened and learned were the best; those who got all defensive were in for a life of under-development. It was also good to learn to give feedback, positive and negative.

Criticism is good. Anyway the TV was all too loud for me. Went to bed with quiet music. Getting old.

The Wire Revisited

theipaper has no web-site yet but can be followed on Twitter if you click the link. On Monday the paper shared a link to a site where a blogger has reimagined cult TV series The Wire as a Victorian Dickensian comic booklet series. What do you think? Find out here.

Litter and American drama

All my life, or at least for as long as I can remember, I've hated litter. A piece of scrap paper blew out of the car as I was driving along the road this week and I can't tell you how mortified I was. I'm still beating myself up about it. I guess that was an accident but in general terms it is the very small amount of effort that people don't put in that annoys me. Our Nailsea Millennium Park after a summer's day looks like a thousand people have been whisked off without warning.

In The Wire Baltimore is litter-strewn. The cops, relaxing with a beer after a long day, throw their empty cans onto a flat roof. The camera tracks away to show the cans of many years piled high. They behave the way everyone behaves in Baltimore. How did it get like this?

I have also enjoyed watching Mad Men but am proceeding slowly through this as Mrs Mustard enjoys it too and so we are watching no more than one or two a week. We are half-way through Series 2. It is the story of the birth of the advertising industry. Mad Men are ad men in the 1960s with all the racism, sexism and smoking that went with it.

In this week's episode a family went on a picnic. At the end they tipped their paper plates, unfinished food, old cans and bottles on to the beautiful, pristine grass slope and drove off. America's lovely open spaces spoilt by people. America - so big the litter won't matter. It was shocking. Upsetting even. We developed this behaviour and fifty years on it is still in the system, even in a densely populated country like the UK.

I don't know if people were really like that in the USA in the early 1960s but the metaphor was clear; these are the people who dirtied up America.

Gotta do better.

Baltimore

Funny how you can know nothing of a place and then it crops up twice in quick succession. I have been a late entrant to The Wire fan club but am now two episodes off the end of the fourth and final series. If you like character-driven drama and can cope with bad language, sex and violence then this is for you. Gritty is an over-used adjective for street-cop stories but I'll allow it in this case. It's set in a corrupt, drug-fuelled Baltimore.

I've also been reading the biography of H.L.Mencken, the great American journalist, by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. He was a wonderful mapper of the change of language use, a great satirist and a poker-of-fun at all fundamentalist Christianity - he also, for some reason, had it in for osteopaths. He worked for the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Herald newspapers. There's the link. One city, two stories. One true, one fiction. 100 years separate the two. Fascinating.

Televison - the Drug of the Nation

I accidentally watched three minutes of Big Brother on Friday night. A lass who appeared to have been made out of the left-over bits from a self-assembly super-model kit was discussing her eviction. Dreadful, dreadful freak-show stuff.

It got me pondering about the goggle box. Increasingly I find myself watching DVD sets, currently The Wire and Mad Men, rather than 'live' TV. My habits have changed. Here is what I watched last week, as far as I can recall:

Mastermind
Celebrity Masterchef
The Championship
Grand Designs Revisited

I get my news headlines from the BBC web-site and news and comment from the radio so find TV news out of date if I've heard Today, the World at One, PM or the 6 o'clock news (and sometimes all of them). For discussion of the news I read a newspaper.

Whole days pass without the TV being switched on at all and then I use the catch-up service on the iplayer. Shame Match of the Day isn't available though.

I grew up in the 1950s and watched a 15 minute lunchtime children's programme on a black and white set. By the early 1960s I can recall there being two five o'clock programmes for children on weekdays. These were extended fifteen minutes earlier by Jackanory (a talking-head story-teller with illustrations) and by five minutes later with the Magic Roundabout slot.

As I grew older I was allowed to stay up to watch Thunderbirds (coining the phrase supermarionation for a puppet show) at 7p.m. followed by The Man from Uncle which ended at 8.50 and I had to go straight to bed.

Colour TV came to our house in 1972. On marrying, Mrs Mustard and I decided to do without a tele for a couple of years. It was a good decision and we had some fun evenings talking, or listening to BRMB radio (Robin Valk's rock show). I spent a month at my in-laws during the 78 world cup though. We got a tele, a dog, a cat and a son in the space of about six months in 1979/80. A video-cassette recorder wasn't available until about 1984 but I recall the joys of days off from my first curacy watching hired movies. I guess the next generation have no idea what it is like to 'miss' a programme.

But for the first 30 years of my life it was not possible to rearrange viewing time. You either watched or didn't. Being sent to your room and missing TV when I was a child was a real punishment. Apart from during occasional illnesses Mrs M and I have never had a TV in the bedroom and won't.

On my list of things to try and avoid these days:

All soaps
Any reality TV where reality consists of a mainly false environment
Any audience - elimination programme where you vote (which costs)
Anything with horses in it - racing, jumping, grooming or western
Situation comedy with a canned laughter track
Documentaries about surgery, weight loss or bodies being weird

But sensibly watched and carefully measured TV entertains, informs and keeps you company. My knowledge and skills base has been singularly improved recently by Time Team, Coast, Grand Designs and Masterchef. It's a long way from Rag, Tag and Bobtail.

TV Repairs

Readers may recall that just before Christmas I had some amazing customer service from Virgin Media who replaced my faulty set-top box on Christmas Eve.

It didn't fix the fault.

So having eliminated a TV fault (by trying a different set), and a set-top box fault, we were left with but one conclusion - both scart leads we had tried were faulty.

Over Christmas we had a lot of guests and to make more room in the house opened the double doors in our lounge which divide it in two. So, as we were watching TV on Saturday evening, it was observed by Mrs Mustard to be strange, because we could now see the TV and the illuminated Christmas tree in the front window at the same time, that the digital interference on screen coincided with the flashing of the Christmas tree lights. Lights which had not been turned on at the time of the engineer's early visit.

Apologies Virgin. It is our circuits that need fixing, not your set-top boxes or signal. We grovel.

Christmas Thoughts

We play a little game at this time of year, her and me. Sitting on the sofa watching commercial TV there is a point available for the first person to correctly identify a perfume advert. You have to shout 'fragrance' to win the point. Point off for a miscall. Don't listen to any of that rubbish about women being less competitive than men; I was in the kitchen making the supper the other day and heard the word 'fragrance' shouted from the lounge.

This is not quite as easy as it sounds. At first I constantly misidentified a hair products ad and more recently keep getting thrown by one for a particular vodka mixer (save the advert - only tonic works and not diet tonic).

There are other things I'm tempted to shout. When Dervla (and she does have a sexy voice I admit) says '...this is not just food' in her light porn com for M&S I want to shout out that it is. It's just food and it didn't do much better than any of the other supermarkets in a blind tasting reported in the Guardian on Monday.

And as for the hint that the true spirit of Christmas is epitomised by an Argos delivery. I want to cry that the true spirit of Christmas is epitomised by poverty, a census and the slaying of the first born - nothing personal Ben, looking forward to seeing you later.

For my sister the true spirit of Christmas is to get out of the country as far away as possible come Boxing Day. For my second born snowboarding in South Korea cuts the mustard.

So don't be fooled by hollow traditions. Don't even be fooled when the wise David Winter on thought for the day says the Christmas story is a mystery - this is theological speak for 'It's pretty damn deep and we don't know if it really happened.'

So have your self a merry little oh please sorry got carried away. Do what you do and do it sensibly. For everything else there's Mastercard - and don't get me started on them. First up against the wall.

Maybe we should shout 'con' when the adverts come on. We'd not need to have a competition. We'd simply shout it in unison every time. Good morning.

Celebrity Chefs

Heston, Jamie and Gordon are probably the A list celebrity chefs right now. I know this will upset Rick, Hugh and the Ready, Steady Cook gang but by and large those guys are the top three.

But how amazingly different they are. Heston's current TV programme is unbelievable as he searches for the thing that makes great dishes greater - black forest gateau, fish and chips, pizza, steak and salad - and then tries to reproduce the result with a modern twist in a way you and I could at home. Not that you and I would ever be able to afford or host a £2000 gizmo to assess the dry matter content of a potato. Nor would we attach the hoover tools to a laundry bag full of chocolate mousse. But Heston takes an inordinately long time and effort to make a great dish greater. Which is why he runs a three starred best restaurant in the world.

Gordon is an entrepreneur. Obviously a fine chef but with a brilliant understanding of 'good enough'. He knows what is good enough for every given commercial opportunity. He knows what will sell and how to source it as cheaply as possible. He swears too much and uses confrontation as a management technique but in narrowing down the people who can work with him he gets some pretty patient co-workers, all anxious to learn.

Jamie is a fidget. If he hasn't thrown together four new combinations of flavours before breakfast he is hell to live with for the rest of the day. He is also a youth worker who wants to see children and young people love food as he does.

I'd love to see a programme simply recording a conversation between them. I think a co-operative exercise would be impossible to arrange.

Richard Dawkins

Watched the second of Dawkins' two programmes about religion last night. I missed the first but had heard it wasn't as good as we might have expected from a professor charged with the advancement of science. He did continue his attack on paper tigers - most intelligent Christians I know would have felt the three particular enemies he picked on - separatist Jewish communities, extreme Christian faith schools teaching intelligent design and US hellfire preaching were worth having a go at.

He was also constrained by the fact that he would have been in danger if he'd said, 'The Prophet was barking mad' but was quite happy to state that Jesus was. Christians are genuinely, by and large, slow to take offence.

More interesting, and I wished it had gone on for longer, was the interview with Richard Harries.

I think there was a good TV programme and an intelligent debate trying to get out of the screen last night but it stayed stuck in. Is it really only a faith position that makes people oppose abortion? For someone who insists that truths are only truths if verifiable scientifically I wanted to see better research into this statement. Likewise, '...only religion can make good people bad.' Dawkins seems to have decided what is bad in a very unscientific way.

Anyway, as Nick Pollard says in this brilliant Damaris article, where is the scientific backing for a statement such as , 'You should only believe what is verifiable by science?' It is as daft a statement as 'I don't know a word of English' or 'I am absolutely convinced there are no absolute truths.'

I long for Christians to engage their brains in this debate but the way Dawkins does his work he is too easy to ignore. If we and he are shooting at the same targets where's the battle?

Those who want their thinking about science and creation stretched a bit might read this from last Saturday's Guardian.