Opinion8: Must-see TV

See end for the most tenuous Kinks link yet.

Judging this by the programmes that changed our expectation of TV, said something new or had the ability to touch me, sometimes every episode. As usual, I've chosen 8 (as in Opinion8). Some of these shows I didn’t see first time around but I’ve listed them in date of broadcast order.

Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar)

First, a disclaimer: By all rights Buffy the Vampire Slayer should be in this list but I want to include it in my Opinion8 Top Teen TV Shows and as I’ve already put Buffy herself in another blog, I didn’t want there to be Buffy overkill. I don’t want to detract from its importance. I think it was a watershed in television and will always remember seeing the first episode on BBC2. My Dad and my brother also saw it, each of us separately and I definitely spoke to one or both of them on the phone afterwards. I seriously think we can talk about TV as pre- and post-Buffy. It’s just a shame that there have been so many derivative rather than innovative programmes resulting from the super-popularity and sheer brilliance of the original. I don't include Angel in this category. If anything, Angel surpassed Buffy, in humour, action, characterisation. I mean instead the Twilight franchise, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries. I could go on.

Lesley Uggams as Kizzy in Roots

1 Roots (1977)

The theme music here sounds far jollier than I remember. I’m sure the version on the BBC series was more stately, more sombre but I might be wrong. I wrote this to begin with: true-life drama on an epic scale, bringing to the forefront the evils of the slave trade and its consequences but I’ve just read that what I thought was the result of an investigation by Alex Haley into his heritage, was actually a novel. I’m a little disillusioned but still can't fault the TV series and the programme makers’ courage in tackling such an emotive subject and doing it so brilliantly. A classic in the era of the TV miniseries. It worked because the characters were so easy to like and empathise with (who can forget Kunta Kinte, Kizzy and Chicken George?) and because the narrative was hauntingly compelling.

(Wiki facts: The series won nine Emmys, a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award and its finale still holds a record as the third highest-rated US television programme.)

Sebastian (Anthony Andrews), Charles (Jeremy Irons) and Aloysius

2 Brideshead Revisited 1981

Was held so completely spellbound by this superbly crafted and impossibly romantic series with its evocative theme music that I wrote my dissertation on Catholicism in the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Just like Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons), we all fell at least a little in love with the beguiling Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews), fascinated by his vicissitudes, excesses, denials. As someone who was already suffering from nostalgia when I left primary school (at 11), I was a total sucker for what Waugh calls ‘a kind of gluttony … for the splendours of the recent past’, even though it wasn’t my recent past. I identified completely.  Spawning the heritage drama of  Merchant-Ivory and forerunner to the Downtons and Austen adaptations of today or what we heard a Sidcup resident describe more prosaically as ‘those olde worlde ones’, it was sumptuous to look at and I was happy to immerse myself in a place and time that was so far removed from my own.

(Wiki facts: In 2000, the serial was tenth in the BFI’s 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, in 2010, second in The Guardian’s Top 50 TV dramas of all time.)

Original cast of ER

3 ER 1994-2009

Must-see TV before the term existed, a water-cooler subject before we even had water-coolers (in the UK at least, yes, seriously). I could talk to people I had nothing in common with but this. ‘What about Doug and Carol then?’ Believable and likeable characters, entertaining or affecting situations – I think I cried nearly every week. Totally escaped my life for an hour. Stuck with it till the end despite not really being enamoured of the new characters in the final season. I was crazy about so many of these people: Carol, Doug, Mark Green, Luka (the episode when he escaped execution in Darfur was heartbreaking), Lucy (how did Kellie Martin end up in the Mystery Woman series – she was excellent), Ray and Neela and their failed-to-ever-get-there romance (we were rooting for him but disaster struck). Week after week the writers put us through the wringer. And we loved it. ER – I’ll never forget you.

Aside: As touched on in a Kinks blog (about who should play Ray and Dave Davies in the upcoming movie), Parminder Nagra (Neela) is another actor who had an early acting role with Keira Knightley (in Bend It Like Beckham) and showed way more promise (like Hans Matheson in Dr Zhivago) but who was left eating dust as Keira raced on to become a major film star. And what has Parminder done since? Ok, Noah Wyle’s (Carter) in Falling Skies, which isn't my cup of tea. Julianna Margulies (Carol) has a lead role in The Good Wife (although Archie Panjabi usually steals the show and Julianna has a hard ask to pretend to be aroused by Will Gardner when Chris Noth is more appealing). And we all know what happened to George Clooney (Doug). I liked him when he was Booker in Roseanne so didn’t need any convincing.

Dish by name; Dish by nature (D. B. Sweeney)

4 Lonesome Dove 1989-90

Never thought I would succumb to a Wild West miniseries but this is simply magnificent TV. The scenery, the acting, the script, the characterisation, the production values are all top-notch. While Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones are beautifully flawed heroes, I fell hook, line and sinker for Dish (D. B. Sweeney), his unrequited devotion to Laurie (Diane Lane) so moving. How could she resist the hat and the moustache, not to mention his soulful gaze? Just hearing the soaring sweep of the fantastic theme music (by Basil Poledouris) effortlessly evokes the vast vistas of Montana can bring tears to my eyes.

(Wiki facts: National Television Critics Association’s Program of the Year and Outstanding Dramatic Achievement; won the D. W. Griffith Award for Best Television Miniseries, with CBS garnering the Peabody Award for Outstanding Achievement in Drama.)

Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper

5 Twin Peaks 1990-1

Weird and wonderful, we’d never seen anything like this. Filmic values, interesting characterisation (Killer Bob, the Log Lady, Special Agent Dale Cooper, Audrey the Lolita, played to perfection by Sherilyn Fenn), cups of Joe, cherry pie and diners, surrealist dreams with people talking backwards. All this plus a murder mystery plot. Some of the time, we didn’t know what was going on but it didn’t really matter. Alien and enchanting, it probably generated my abiding interest in America and Americana. Even the credits are leisurely and otherworldly in that Lynchian everything-is-ordinary-but-nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems way.

(Wiki facts: The pilot ranked 25 on TV Guide's 1997 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time; series ranked 45 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time in 2002; in 2007, it was in Time's Best TV Shows of All-Time.)

Vic (Michael Chiklis), Shane (Walton Goggins)

6 The Shield 2002-8

W..a..a..y before The Wire, Vic and his crew didn’t exactly blur but totally obliterate the (thin blue) line between cops and criminals. As corrupt as the gangs they fought, loyal (at least to begin with) only to each other, not so much flawed as riddled with evil intent, I think each viewer experienced a turning point, when they suddenly started to root for this bad-ass band of brothers. Moments to remember are Vic chasing a bad guy down an alley: the runner climbs over a wooden fence, Vic thinks twice then barges straight through it. In an interview room, Vic says: ‘Good cop and bad cop left for the day. I’m a different kind of cop’. Visceral action, sometimes hard-to-catch dialogue, The Shield put us on the streets with the villains (there were no good guys), Walton Goggins even managed to make me feel sorry for his character Shane after he’d killed another member of the team out of misguided fealty. His confusion and pain were evident in everything he did. The first season of Justified positively fizzed with the chemistry of the dynamic between Goggins’s Boyd and Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan.

(Wiki facts: It won awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Television Series – Drama in 2002; 2008 AFI Award for Best Television Series; and some individual prizes for Michael Chiklis.)

Cast of Lost

7 Lost 2004-10

Mysterious, sexy (the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle, not sure which of these I fancied the most, not to mention Sayid), thrilling, it never really mattered that the denouement didn’t quite resolve all the narrative threads. We lived for the intrigue and rooted for the characters as unlikely heroes developed (Sayid, Lock) in their bid for survival against whatever the island (the writers) would chuck at them next – smoke monsters, the Hatch, the Others, supporting them even when they went back in time to the 70s. They played their roles with such conviction that we accepted various implausible events and the notion that these could all have been orchestrated by the enigmatic Dharma Initiative. But the real mystery was how did so many unfeasibly good-looking people end up on the same plane.

(Wiki facts: Lost won several awards: the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series; the Writers Guild of America Awards  for Outstanding Achievement in Writing for a Dramatic Television Series; and the Screen Actors Guild Awards 2005 for Best Ensemble Cast.)

Michael Peterson

8 Death on the Staircase 2004

This was an incredible documentary by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, that follows the ins and outs, ups and downs of a murder trial (the suspect, a novelist Michael Peterson, is accused of killing his wife). Riveting from start to finish, with all the components of a crime/courtroom drama, it was hard to believe that all this was actually happening. Truth really is stranger than fiction. It has since been made into a movie but it’s nowhere near as involving as the original film. The ‘blow-poke’ (poker to you and me), the disappearance of the ‘blow-poke’, the internet correspondence with an alleged rent boy, the death of another friend of Peterson’s in similar circumstances, the exhumation of a body in Germany. I could go on. Getting the inside track on all this was simply compelling: you felt that you were involved in the process; each episode provoked endless discussion in our house, not least on how ramshackle the process sometimes seemed.

(No Wiki facts but it did win a couple of awards, such as one from the International Documentary Association in 2005 and a Peabody Award in 2006. The show has been updated for Netflix with new episodes and retitled The Staircase, which makes no sense but at least affords an opportunity to watch it again).

I have to admit that I love anything that is dramatic, thrilling, funny, involving and usually those sort of programmes cross genres, are hybrids. After all, I couldn’t categorise my life as a TV or film genre. It’s comic and tragic by turns. It’s not a romcom or a mystery. Actually, scratch that. It is a mystery.

One of the leads in Lost is played by Josh Holloway. Coincidentally, the Kinks have a great song called ‘Holloway Jail’.

Other TV Opinion8 blog is on Career-Defining Roles.

To check out my reviews on Amazon, follow this link.

Opinion8: Career-defining Roles

What I mean by this term is an actor you always call a character name. For instance, Buffy, Grissom, Dawson. This doesn’t mean that the actor hasn’t been any good in anything else, just that they will always be known by this particular series of performances, as this construct, this personality. It informs whatever else they do simply because it’s so recognisable. In a way, it can have a negative long-term effect on a career. It usually occurs in a series as this gives the audience time to identify with the character, to love them, and associate the actor with the role over time. If a series is well written, well observed, intriguing, it tends to throw up more than one of these characters. Buffy (and the spin-off Angel) is a case in point. I would say that not only will we always remember Buffy but also Faith, Angel, Giles, Willow and Xander.

1. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Quipping, kicking, hair-tossing her way through Sunnydale (aka the Hellmouth), SMG will never get a better role than that of this ex-cheerleader vampire hunter, falling for a reformed vampire in the process (yes – way before Bella) and saving the world (a lot). Joss Whedon created an, I hate to say it, icon. An inspirational heroine.

[The only bad thing about Buffy and Angel is that they may have somehow spawned the dreadful, poor-copy TV and film dramas that followed. You know the ones I mean – The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and the incredibly dull, anodyne, humourless and po-faced Twilight franchise. Buffy the character and Buffy the show are everything these are not – sexy, funny, entertaining, gripping, postmodern (quick to cite other teen shows like Dawson’s Creek, with wit and sarcasm) and occasionally erudite.]

2. Kate (Evangeline Lilly) in Lost

Another great female role model. Ok, she was wanted for murder ... Sexy, tough and able to rock sweat-stained T-shirts. The love triangle between her, Jack and Sawyer kept us as enthralled as whatever the hell was going on on the island. Confident, conflicted, convicted, it might be a while before Evangeline gets a part to compare with this. Again, many of the other characters were beautifully realised (Naveen Andrews as Sayeed, and Terry O’Quinn as Locke, in particular).

3. Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) in Brideshead Revisited

Impossibly romantic, incredibly charming, fatally flawed Sebastian. Astonishing to think it was Jeremy Irons (who played the rather dull follower, Charles) who went on to become the movie star. Is it because we’ll always imagine Anthony Andrews with Aloysius under his arm? The novel was amazing source material but the filmic production values also helped. Nostalgia – it ain’t what it used to be.

[Saw an ad in a brochure once for ‘nostalgic fridge magnets’. I wonder what they are exactly and imagine a couple stuck on a fridge. One says to the other ‘Remember that last fridge we were on, mate?’ Other replies ‘Yeah. That was a great fridge’.]

4. JR Ewing (Larry Hagman) in Dallas

Need I say more? Well, a little. Cunning, recidivist, charming, cruel, with a twinkle in his eye and just the right word to send poor Sue Ellen back to the bottle. He made being a cad look easy. The ‘Who Shot JR?’ storyline had everyone hooked in the 80s and was resurrected in the excellent new Dallas. I’m glad he had a chance to reprise his role and teach the young bucks a thing or two. Rest in peace.

5. Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) in Dad’s Army

On endless repeats on BBC2, the charm of the character is that he takes himself and the situations so seriously, even when they become completely ridiculous. It’s not often you laugh at and with the straight man. Just the right blend of bumbling and self-importance to create bathos.

6. John Carter (Noah Wyle) in ER

He’ll always be Carter to us, the junior doctor with whom we entered the exciting world of ER. A sort of Everyman, experiencing everything, from the acerbic mentoring style of Peter Benton, to a romance with Abby, drug addiction, a refugee camp in Africa, and so on. The writers really put him through it. The longest lasting character (there long after Doug Ross and Mark Greene had moved on), he provided continuity and stability, traits evident in his on-screen persona.

7. Gil Grissom (William Petersen) in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

Attempts to replace Grissom with another character have not been that successful. Laurence Fishburne was an interesting choice and worked well for a while. I like Ted Danson too but unfortunately he brought with him my least favourite character, the ever-smiling Finn. Grissom was a dysfunctional manager, possibly on the autistic spectrum, obsessed with entomology, usually seeing the trees rather than the wood, flawed but dogged and strangely likeable.

 

8. Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) in Dawson’s Creek

One of those girls-next-door (usually tomboys with crooked smiles and good at the one-line put-down that is sarcastic but not scathing) desired by every boy, a desire that the tougher ones express by calling the girl by both Christian name and surname. Involved in one of the classic ‘will-they-won't-they?’ on-off romances (with Dawson, the movie-loving, eponymous protagonist played by James Van Der Beek, who’s also struggled to escape his character in this), while also adored by Pacey (the lovable Joshua Jackson, the one who gets to use both names – ‘Joey Potter’).

Bubbling under:

Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) in Smallville
Laura Ingalls (Melissa Gilbert) in Little House on the Prairie

Captain Kirk (William Shatner) in Star Trek

Steve Austin (Lee Majors) in The Six Million Dollar Man
Stuart (Aiden Gillen) in Queer as Folk (UK version)

Other TV Opinion8 blog is on Must-See TV.

To check out my reviews on Amazon, follow this link.

Dave Davies: Satsang II: April 2012: You Only Live Twice

So we decided to have this once-in-a-lifetime experience twice. Starting to remind me of a title for a James Bond movie.

I’m not going to write a complete blog as I don’t want to repeat what someone else might do or has done. Instead, a few snapshots of the weekend, in words. Plus ruminations on the nature of faith.

‘I'm all about denial/But can't denial let me believe’ (‘Pavlov’s Bell’ – Aimee Mann)

I suppose that’s how I would categorise my feelings for Dave’s credo and in fact, any religious doctrine or spiritual creed. Simply wanting to believe cannot make it so because logic, reason, a natural propensity for scepticism often triumph over need and desire. They’re the Spaniards in the works as Lennon might say. Ok, I’m not the world’s most logical person but I do tend to ask too many questions.

So my beliefs bear more resemblance to superstition than anything else. I pray to St Anthony for lost items and to St Jude for lost causes. For me, faith of any kind is a triumph of will over common sense. Dave is obviously very well read and has done his research but me, I judge by results. If it works, I do it again. (Talking of ‘Do It Again’, have just seen the documentary so a review will follow shortly.) I’m not someone who ponders on whether the tree falling in the forest makes a sound kind of thing. Life’s too short; let’s not go there.

Say you watch a fantasy series, you need to suspend your disbelief in order to accept that vampires exist, that Buffy can kill them, that Sunnydale is the Hellmouth, etc. My attitude reminds me of something my Dad once said, while watching an episode of Smallville (I’ve long since stopped worrying about my Dad’s unerring interest in US teen dramas); one of the teens with meteor powers uses them in a destructive way, so, in order to control this, she’s forced to wear a bracelet made of lead, which prevents her from accessing her powers. My Dad is up in arms over this: ‘Ridiculous! As if a lead bracelet could do that! …’, etc. He’s happy to believe that a meteor shower could give people special abilities, that an alien arrived from the Planet Krypton and is living as a Kansas farmboy before becoming Superman but he draws the line at the efficacy of a lead bracelet. Now, whenever we’re watching something that does invite the suspension of disbelief, and we’re tempted to question an event that seems even more unlikely than the general tenor of the film might dictate, we call it ‘having a lead bracelet moment’ and laugh at ourselves – why is this one thing less credible than the rest? But we all have them, I think, those moments, however spurious, the lines we’re not willing to cross, either out of reason or out of fear, the bridge too far. I’m not sure Dave has them though and that’s what makes his outlook and his conversation so fascinating. It could lead anywhere.

Dave doesn’t discount or disavow other religions, mentioning Christ, Ganesh and Buddha – he’s inclusive and accepting and has cast his net wide in search of enlightenment. So, we’re looking at a patchwork quilt of different philosophies, so that, as well as a buffet lunch, we can partake of a spiritual smorgasbord (always wondered if I’d ever get a chance to use that word), with some options for the more refined palate, or those who have acquired a taste for something relatively rare, and others more easily digestible to the spiritual novice.

It’s the sort of thing I’m perfectly at home with, although I don’t accept that any of it is necessarily true or real; I have a similarly inclusive mentality. Why shouldn’t it be so? Although I’ve never seen an angel, I believe Dave when he says he has. At the risk of sounding facetious, I always wanted a visit from the Blue Fairy.

Perhaps my problem is that I’ve never particularly desired enlightenment. I’m more at ease with confusion. Should the divine be explicable or should it remain a mystery? Transubstantiation, the Trinity (such a beautiful word), reincarnation, all lovely ideas that might fall apart under analysis.

What seems contradictory though is the rejection of the ritual of established Western religions (vicars, communion, incense, kneeling to pray and so forth) and the embracing of concomitant rituals in Eastern faiths, such as gurus, types of breathing, mantras, chanting, meditation, all of which to me are just symptoms of the same kind of mind control. Why should chanting a certain phrase be any more effective than saying a Hail Mary? I’m sure Dave would say it wouldn’t be, that they would both have value.

Maybe I harp on about this because I find being instructed, however gently, when and how to breathe extremely stressful, partly because of my complete inability to comply, and thus, while for others, it is inducing a sense of peace, the perfect prelude to meditation, in me, a state of panic is rising and the very opposite is achieved.

[In the ante-room, there’s a statue, a Buddha or an Indian god, I can't remember, with a bowl of satsumas in front of it. I was just about to nab one before I realised that possibly they were an offering to the deity – I’ve been on a Buddhist retreat so I’m a little wise to this sort of thing – I do see someone else take and eat one later though but I won't tell on them.]

‘Look through any doorway/Tell me what you see’

Who’s to say what’s real, whether the voices people hear are those of spirit guides or demons or aliens or the result of drug-induced psychosis? If the latter, does it make them any less valid? Maybe it’s simply another way of opening the mind, of looking at the world? Perhaps it’s how we react to them that determines our fate, whether we consider them friend or foe. I know many people who have, sometimes as the result of a bad trip, sometimes through stress, developed what used to be diagnosed as schizophrenia. Some have never returned to ‘normality’ (whatever that is – I know the way I live would not fit most people’s definition; as Dave says in Kink, ‘What’s normal, anyway?’), some are fine for a while on medication, then relapse, some just cope with the existence of a certain amount of what could be deemed ‘unreality’. Just watched a documentary on Peter Green; his experience with mescaline is a good example.

Dave copes well without his spiritual helpmeet, Rosina, absent through illness but the schedule suffers a little – I wanted to hear about the UFOs but, for some reason, we never got round to this.

Without the constant rain of last year, we were able to appreciate the location. Although not far removed from town, there was still a sense of remoteness, of cut-off-ness, ideal for a retreat. Plus this time we took the Magic Bus (some of our number having been on the real ‘Magic Bus’ that I had only read about in novels and didn’t imagine had actually existed), so the length of the path we were on felt emphasised as we were driven through picturesque chocolate-box villages on our way out to sea.

‘True Phenomenon’

That connection with Dave, not as pronounced this time, but he certainly felt my breathlessness, as an asthmatic without an inhaler, when I entered the room, asking ‘Are you having trouble breathing?’ I was suffering from a sense of disquiet too that I hoped I hadn’t communicated to him (or that he hadn’t communicated to me) as a friend thought he seemed more relaxed than last year. I thought he was pretty relaxed last year.

I was more in awe than last time, perhaps because then I had only liked the Kinks for two months and had had only a little time to absorb the huge amount of material they had produced over their thirty-year career, not to mention all the solo stuff. I knew they were amazing but hadn’t really absorbed the scale of their talent.

Highlights of the gigs: Dave on acoustic ‘Are You Ready, Girl?’, ‘Fortis Green’ a stormer both nights, ‘Milk Cow Blues’ a rousing finale, the new songs, ‘Green Amp’ and ‘Remember the Future’, which he did when requested. Dave, ever obliging, sang, when asked ‘Visionary Dreamer’, with a member of the audience and delivered ‘Dead-End Street’ almost word-perfect although it had not been rehearsed. Surprised by how much I enjoyed ‘Hare Krishna’, even the singing along and ‘Creeping Jean’ which used to frighten me. Loved dancing to ‘Sea of Heartbreak’. I had requested ‘Imagination’s Real’; they had rehearsed it; but Dave didn’t seem to want to play it so I said I didn’t mind if they didn’t. Listening to it now and it’s so darn pretty, I wish they had played it.

As Molly, our lovely yoga teacher, was about to leave, there were calls for ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. Thank God Dave had the presence of mind not to comply; the lyrics would have been a little inappropriate ‘Good golly, Miss Molly, Sure likes to ball’ for this remarkably prescient young lady.

Band personnel (as last time but minus Kristi – we missed you): Jonathan Lea, David Nolte, Frank Rawle. And Dave of course!

People: There were fewer of us (due to some last-minute cancellations) so it was great to see some familiar faces and get better acquainted as well as meet some new recruits. Last year, there were some people I only spoke to on the last day and wished there’d been more time. With fewer people, it was easier to get to know each other. Although the instant sense of camaraderie wasn’t there – that first time was different probably because it was the first time – they were all lovely, like- and open-minded folk.

The artwork: I did manage to add something to it this time; last time I never got round to it and thought any addition I made could only detract from the general effect. So I went with words instead of images. As Jackie (Leven) was very much on my mind, I used an album title of his. Luckily, writing with a paintbrush looks sort of artistic.

Mementoes: There was a raffle and I got a copy of The Aschere Project: Two Worlds, which is probably ‘prog’ enough for my Dad to like. I’ll have to lend it to him. Interesting and actually much more listenable than I expected. (Actually two days since I wrote this, I woke up singing the title track - it's a grower.)

Also managed to scalp a setlist that the band was kind enough to autograph and received another special memento, courtesy of Jonathan (it’s nothing inappropriate).

‘There were times when there was absolute compassion in the air’

(Sorry to quote Ray here but he does have a way with words)

For all of us there, I can only say follow Dave’s advice and ‘Trust your heart’. Surely any issue or disagreement can be resolved if we simply allow love, compassion and respect to prevail.

In the back of a record rack/There's an old double pack/Twelve inches and black/With an old crumpled cover/But every track is stacked

On our last night, members of the group said they were going to reconvene at the Anchor in the evening and gave us very specific directions to reach it. We passed these onto the rest of the party. Left Dave’s house and tried to find the pub. Came across another one, the Crown, but had somehow missed the Anchor, I thought because we’d been talking, and walked past it. I was dispatched into the pub to ask. The natives were friendly and happy to engage with me on the subject of the mysterious Anchor although they listed all the pubs in town (which I already knew) and could only surmise that we were expected to go to a nearby town (we’ll call it ‘Mordor’) where there was a Blue Anchor. Mordor was a long way away, down a very steep hill. I said ‘I’m not going to **** ing Mordor!’ Then my sister came in, and noticed people waving at us from the back of the room, the people who’d told us to come to the Anchor. Even now, they had no idea this was the Crown. Girls! Anyway, then I went back to the bar and asked the regulars to pretend this was the Anchor if anyone else asked. Sure enough, another group arrives, puzzled too that here’s a pub at the exact location but it’s not the right pub. So they ask a man smoking outside – ‘Do you know where the Anchor is?’ and he replies, ‘Apparently, it’s here tonight’. It was a lovely pub though, with a turntable and we could choose our own music from a box of records on the table, so we started off with a Kinks greatest hits, so inevitably there was dancing; the backroom looked like a record library. What an amazing collection. Plus they stayed open till 1 a.m., still serving one of us. How welcoming.

So the tale of how we renamed Dave’s local for one night will make us legends in our own lunch hour.

Picture is of the sunrise after a

Sunrise from the hotel

‘Sleepless Night’

Had a strange experience in bed that last night. I take a lot of medication to help me sleep but suddenly I found myself thrown off the bed so violently that I bit through my lip, causing it to bleed and swell up. I’ve never fallen out of bed in my life before and this was a double bed, much bigger than mine. Now, if I’d bitten my tongue, I could have taken it as a sign … . Annoyingly, we were going to meet someone we work with the next day, for the very first time, so he’s going to think I’m a bit of a bruiser, like the young Dave, picking fights in bars. I did notice that everyone was very friendly to me on the train home, no doubt anxiously wondering what the other guy looked like.

Anyway, it was great fun but it feels weird to blog about it because it’s a little like going to stay with friends then writing a report afterwards ... what they said, what you ate and so on ...

Booked tickets to see Ray now but can't imagine it could compare to being a foot away from Dave when he’s performing. If only Ray were playing some more intimate venues. Looking forward to it though.