I am somewhat regretting starting this blog with the comment “I’m a natural optimist and positive person – happy, even. However, increasingly I feel that maintaining this approach requires a basic background environment that is at least OK”

Clearly, we are now facing a background environment that is even less “OK” than it was a year ago.  This is leading me to think even harder about the life- and purpose-affirming things worth celebrating over and above the family, home and friends that keep me going most of the time.  You may detect from my radio silence over the last few months that this has been tricky.  In my defence, I’ve been busy.  Also, an unexpected factor has been that it seems somewhat perverse to celebrate trivial things in a world of unusually serious tectonic shifts.

However, I’m going to have a go.

For some time, I was mulling over a celebration of the Derry Girls as near-perfect sitcom TV.  As with something like Bluestone 42, the ability to take a very serious and literally divisive context, populate it with a range of characters you care about, and make it consistently very funny is a rare skill, and something to be celebrated.  Kudos to Lisa McGee for this – it’ll be fascinating to see what she does next.  Sitcoms that “work” aren’t exactly rare, of course, and what works for me might not do so for you, but life would be a lot duller without them.

I’ve also been watching a lot of old vampire and horror films from the 60s and 70s which, despite often very creaky special effects and dubious plots, can be staffed by very good actors and thus acting.  British efforts in this category I think benefited from a great cross-fertilisation with theatre and one also gets the pleasure of watching yet-to-be-famous actors in early roles.  Kudos also here to the British Film Institute for taking these films appropriately seriously and making them available on BFI Player, and in particular to the Flipside team of Vic Pratt and William Fowler, whose book The Bodies Beneath is a very entertaining read on this subject.  It’ll take a few decades to tell whether this synergy is still there and whether today’s efforts and emerging talents will be similarly celebrated by the archivists of the future, but I hope so.

Finally, another persistent source of interest has been the “Walter Presents” section of World Drama on the channel 4 streaming service 4OD.  Walter’s hyperbolic introductions get a bit samey after a while, but his heart is in the right place and the sheer diversity of non-UK sources keeps things interesting.  Some of the plots and plot devices even from different countries can also be repetitive (e.g. the boss of the “rogue detective” who is always being leaned on by the press, politicians and higher-ups for quick results and threatening to pull the plug…), but the variety of cultural context really helps subvert the “I already know where this is going” factor that can be a risk with local TV.  The development of a truly global pool of TV (and film) access is a great feature of the internet, I feel, and hopefully a source of cross-cultural understanding.  Takk!

Meanwhile, it’s also heartening to have the time to watch the natural world in action relatively unaffected by human concerns and challenges.  Our spending on seed is amply repaid by watching the competition around the bird table and seeing how many species pay attention and join (or jump) the queue after the daily distribution.

Is this trivial?  I’m really not sure.  Maybe it’s the deeper truth.