So one of my resolutions this year is to use this site more and post frequently. You might say that this is a feeble attempt at me to get an entry into Jan 2 before I go to bed. And to be honest you’re not far wrong.
Here are some things I learnt today:
1. It’s really not a good idea to let your washing build up for such a long time that when you come to hang it in your wardrobe, there’s not enough hangers for all your clothes (and that’s after chucking those trousers you’ve been hanging onto for years in vain hope that you’re going to drop down a size. Yes – I know I should have given the clothes to charity. I feel guilty OK?)
2. Speed is still a really good film. I didn’t even know it was on, but I just had to watch it again. Working at Virgin Radio, we have stars coming into the building all the time, but I’m still upset that the day Sandra Bullock was due to come in, she didn’t show. And I’d brought my video copy of Speed in and everything! That film was made in 1994 – 10 years ago. Scary.
3. But not as scary as the fact that The Breakfast Club was made twenty years ago in 1984, as the BBC1 announcer so gleefully informed us. And what a fantastic soundtrack it still has.
4. Radio 4 newsreaders seem to have taken to saying “twenty oh four” for 2004. When did this start? I notice that the presenter of PM, Eddie Mair, is resolutely saying “two thousand and four” which is the way it should be. I know that it makes sense given the intervening centuries in which the English language was established, but it just sounds wrong.
5. The National Theatre of Brent should be supported by Lottery funding. Following his wonderful adaptation of “The Young Visiters” on Boxing Day, Patrick Barlow returned to his roots with his version of the life of the Mona Lisa on Radio 4. Sadly, Desmond still gets all the best lines, and Raymond has to play all the women.
6. Tickets to the New Year’s Day Concert in Vienna are very expensive. It’s become something of a personal tradition of mine to sit down and either watch or listen to the concert live on BBC2 and Radio 3. For whatever reason, my Wavefinder recordings of the concert have gone quite wrong over the last couple of years, either running out of disk space mid-concert, or not allowing for a long enough over-run. This year I think I have the full concert, and despite rumours to the contrary, it was not hived off to BBC4, but we got the usual hour or so of it ending with the Blue Danube and the Radetzky March. This year Riccardo Muti was the conductor, with the Vienna Philharmonic this year sporting two female musicians up from last year’s one. The entire concert will shortly be available on CD from Deutsche Gramaphone (it seems to chop and change labels year by year), and the draw to gain tickets is at this site, but only for a limited time. You too could be rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of Viennese society, and Roger Moore too. I note that that a lot of people are particularly squeezed into their seats and a lot of people get a very restricted view standing at the back. I’m not sure that you don’t get a better view at home, with the pieces for which we TV viewers get ballets performed in adjacent buildings. And can someone tell me who Brian Large is. We don’t get a great deal of classical music on the television, but inevitably he’s the director of it all. He seems to have the whole thing tied up in much the same way as Ken Morse has all the rostrum camera work.