It has been, for no obvious reason, a day of incongruous anniversaries. It is the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. It is fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is fifty years (tomorrow, I think) since the first episode of Doctor Who.
I do not always find time to celebrate these things, but I have tried to make some effort over Britten, being one of my favourite composers. I went to see Peter Grimes at the Lowry a few weeks ago, a stirring performance involving lots of nets, or actually just the one large net, which I suppose was a powerful metaphor of the ties that bind the fishing community together while excluding Grimes the outsider. And I've got a backlog of celebratory programmes to watch on the television recording device thing. The recording device thing is also groaning under the weight of celebratory Doctor Who programmes, as there has been a deluge of them broadcast over the last few days. But they provide a fascinating reprisal of fifty years of popular culture, which would in a way be a potted history of my own life, had I not spent quite so much of it hiding behind the sofa.
No comments:
Post a Comment