Friday, December 18th, 2009
Matt and I were at the very enjoyable and good value for money Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People last night. It had quite a furtive geeky atmosphere which I wasn’t expecting, but on reflection that does make sense. Science and atheism seem more embattled in the public and media domain than they ought to be really. You can’t move without bumping into something homeopathic, religious, science-denying or superstitious these days. Irrationalism is on the march!
But it wasn’t at the UCL Bloomsbury last night. It was a marvellous bill, a mix of comedy, music and informative lecture. There was Robyn Hitchcock doing his droll slightly mad monologues and a song about trilobites. There was Johnny Ball doing dirty old man jokes and being contagiously enthusiastic about the amount of amazing knowledge we have at our fingertips in this country. The boyish and clever Baba Brinkman did an amazing rap re-working Dead Prez’s “I’m a African” so that it was a self-reflective ode to evolution and common humanity. Barry Cryer got us all on our feet screaming “peace and quiet” over and over again. Josie Long explored with us what ghosts might eat (if we were foolish enough to believe in them of course).
My favourite one was fast talking and enthusiastic physicist Brian Cox, who is working at the Large Hadron Collider. He gave a presentation about simplicity and complexity in the universe, about very very big things and very very small things. He pointed out how everything in the universe is made of just a few elementary leptons and quarks, glued together by just four forces.
There was a great bit quite reminiscent of the old Powers of Ten video where he used Hubble pictures to zoom into one piece of the night sky, the size of a 5p coin. As you zoomed in, what was empty space filled up with growing specks of light. Each speck of light was in fact a galaxy, there are over 100 billion galaxies each containing over 100 billion stars. The universe is indeed extremely big.
Brian also showed us some stirring pictures of Earth from space. One was the famous 1968 picture of our world from the moon, the picture that is sometimes said to have launched the environmental movement.
The picture I hadn’t seen before, but which moved me greatly, was the farthest away picture of the Earth, taken by Voyager from 4 billion miles away as it left the Solar System. It’s the little dot in the photo below.
Brian then made a plea not to cut funding for the kind of scientific research that leads us to explore these vast distances, pointing out simply that it helps us to understand ourselves. Much as an archaeologist or anthropologist studies the farthest reaches of human history or cultural variation in order to shed light on our own condition.
He ended with a TS Eliot quote from the Four Quartets, which did actually make me cry.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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Thursday, April 9th, 2009
Matt and I went to see Dog Ate Cake perform their third Victorian farce, ‘Duel in the Dark’, at the Canal Cafe Theatre last night.
It was great! A really good little play for one thing, written by the co-creator of Punch, though it hasn’t been performed since 1852. The three main actors were all excellent and Henry’s production has struck a really good balance between sticking formally to the original play and adapting it with a more ‘modern’ take on the farce genre, so we felt like we all knew and understood the conventions of this dramatic mode, even though this kind of farce is pretty much never seen nowadays.
Much of it felt like it was being improvised, especially the physical comedy, and there was an informality and freshness about it, and a nice unthreatening encouragement of audience participation. Keep on eye on Dog Ate Cake’s future performances – it feels like they are on a roll!
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Sunday, May 4th, 2008
Met up with Sneh last night, and Mark H and young Andrew, for more of the irrepressible Inkey Jones at the Thistle Hotel! As well as taking the piss out of the Welsh people in the audience in the first half, he did lots of material not based on insulting the audience in the second half! It was good stuff, lots of dirty sexual humour and the occasional reference to Bill Hicks. We headed on to a Chinese meal afterwards and made jokes about their end of meal napkins being too cold and them not being able to afford a microwave. Then we went back to the Thistle Hotel to try and make Inkey Jones drink with us. He wasn’t having any of that though and fled with a fellow comedian into the Saturday night.
.
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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
To the Canal Café Theatre in Warwick Avenue for the second Dog Ate Cake production from Henry Bell and his talented troupe. The performance started auspiciously with a dog on stage actually eating some cake! Nice.
Then it was a mid-nineteenth century farce concerning a man who was worried he would become too “stout” and his wife would leave him, with all kinds of hilarity as he tries to lose weight. It was great fun. They’d updated the text quite nicely, at one point apparently metamorphing a rather crude joke about hard of hearing people being a bit crap into a more subtle, and funny, joke about hard of hearing people being equally valued employees of a gentleman’s household.
There was lots more physical humour than in the first Dog Ate Cake performance, with amusing key words like “pumpkin” which whenever stated would cause everyone to look up over the audience with a wistful gaze, or “poo” which would cause everyone to check the underneath of their shoes. It was good. All the Bell Clan were in attendance too, so it was nice to see them all.
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Saturday, January 5th, 2008
Matt and I went for a great amateur dramatics evening last night at Greenwood Theatre, near Guy’s Hospital, where Kat was starring in a panto of Robinson Crusoe. There were baddies, there were goodies, there were bits when all the kids had to shout at the stage, it was all great fun, mildly shambolic too, but then it was their opening night!
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