Between Olympics

Well, not quite.  The Paralympics have in fact started.  But I started this post in the hiatus between the two Games, and I'm not changing the title now.  So:

As I sit here between Olympics, and with the godawful ticketing system still not working properly, and not likely to let us get to see any Paralympic competitions up close in the near future, if at all, it seems a good time, as they say on Thought for Today, to pause and reflect.

We always expected the Olympics to be far, far better, and more worthwhile, than the benighted Jubilee - and they didn't disappoint.  We were on Dartmoor, on holiday, during the Opening Ceremony, which meant we got to watch it on a huge plasma TV.  Which was nice.

As every commentator - well most commentators - have said, it was astonishingly good. 

I have to admit, when I first heard about the bucolic idyll that was being planned, a fantasy English countryside, my heart sank. But even that was enlivened by the rippling blue cloth that covered the stands and allowed us to see the idyll as 'sea-girt'.

And then we tore it all up in the Steam-driven Pandemonium of the Industrial Revolution, led by  Sir Kenneth Branagh as Caliban (a theme for all four ceremonies it seems) - cum - Brunel.  Echoes of Blake and Milton. 

Followed by (in random order):-
- NHS nurses (a great invention from 1948)
- Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti.
- Suffragettes
- Voldemort from Harry Potter,  Rowling and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, and Mary Poppins (all representing children's literature?  But no Blyton I could see, nor Ahlberg, nor Kerr). And that section did  cause our 15-y-o to comment along the lines that the good socialist message of the NHS was undermined by the children in beds having to be saved by the privatised care of Mary Poppins...
- Beckham on a speedboat looking terribly stylish, and fireworks on Tower Bridge as it opened to let his ego through...
- The Swinging Sixties and psychedelia
- The Stunt Queen: so much more approachable than the one we have...
- The noise of the Tardis in the middle of another Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...  (but why?)
- Rowan Atkinson & Simon Rattle in Chariots of Fire
A section on media (ish), introduced by the pips, Radio 4 and the Archers, leading to a house full of film and TV clips -  while decades of our pop and rock played...
- Python and Fawlty Towers, (let's ignore Eric Idle in the Closing Ceremony for the moment)
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Kes
- Gregory's Girl
- Bagpuss
- Queen Who Stones  Beatles
- Madness 
- Mud
- Jetpacks and Tim Berners-Lee
But sadly no Thunderbirds or HHGTTG or Fast Show that I noticed...

All really good fun.  But it did make me realise that we here at TANH appear to have been writing about the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in half of our postings, without really knowing what we were doing...  It's like we were revising for it.

So is that it?  Do we have to stop writing about all that stuff now?

Upon Rewatching Kind Hearts and Coronets

The other day I was at home in the afternoon and caught "Kind Hearts and Coronets" on TV. Probably the first time I'd seen it in twenty or thirty years, and even then I missed the beginning. It was a strange, quite extreme experience. I have a half-memory of seeing the film many times when I was younger - say from the age of seven to fifteen - on TVs at home or at my Nan's. I found I not only remembered a great deal of the dialogue over that seeming gulf of time (which is perhaps not so surprising, given that it is highly arch and mannered, with carefully constructed well-turned phrases and balanced sentences), but that I also recalled almost every feature of set, costume, walk and gesture. I found, and still find a few days later, this a strange and and excessive experience. The cool, tempered, black-and-white film playing out at its own pace, unfurling its narrative, which I found I knew fully in advance. I felt somehow gripped by it, unable to look away.

I still can't fully explain this, except by reference to the lenght of time since I used to watch it a lot, and hence the degree to which it managed to catch me by surprise. Also, it has a very beguiling developing storyline, with few repeated or recuperated scenes. Indeed, those settings which do recur (eg those associated with Louis's office life) tend to blur together, and I don't recall them well at all. But the great single scenes (the murders, Sibella's attempt to blackmail Louis, the hangman's poetry reading for example) clearly stay in the mind for a considerable period.

Is this also related also to the mannered, Edwardian style? Hard to say. Other films I watched at the same time (eg "The Lavender Hill Mob", "633 Squadron", "Zulu" and "The Titfield Thunderbolt" come to mind) seem, when I think of them, to have left no similar effect. But now I think about it one other film from that period in my life has remained: "A Matter of Life and Death". I remember seeing that after some time, and again the scenes were instantly familiar to me, the infinite staircase, the frozen table tennis match and the American jury for example. Yet even that great film doesn't have quite the sense of being fully recalled, when I think about it, that "Kind Hearts..." does.