Be Excellent To Each Other

That's what I was thinking. Unless that just Derren Brown being Derren Brown on us.

Yes, it was on Channel 4 and they started with smaller compliances like getting them to pretend the meat sausage rolls were vegetarian to test compliance.

Ah yes, back in early 2016 or so. Looks like past me wasn't impressed.

Not sure what to make of that. I can't help feeling that some of the participants could end up being quite badly affected by it.

Yeah but don't forget that because it's on TV, you can believe about 15% of it is real and not some jazzed up rubbish for the camera.

Did they keep the timer telling you how long to go before the moneyshot?

Finished S1 of Britannia last night. I really enjoyed it.

It details the Roman invasion of Britain when the country was nowt but fields, drugged-up druids and warring tribes.

It looks excellent, features stand-out performances from David Morrissey, MacKenzie Crook and a host of formidably bad-ass female leads including Zoe Wanamaker.

The tone is at times jarring, shifting between grubby bawdiness and gruesome disembowellings.

But on the whole it was fascinating to watch, telling a fantastical story in an authentic-feeling historical setting.

I got bored about ep6. I'll try and go back to it. They're trying to make the girl be Arya Stark when in fact she's just irritating and dull.

Tek that back yer fooking bastard.

Just watched the first episode of BBC2's gritty reboot of Lord Clarke's famous 'Civilisation'.

The photography was stunning and the artifacts were fascinating, but the opening episode just didn't really hang together for me. It was more like an extended show-and-tell of cool stuff from history rather than an attempt to put them into wider argument about the nature of things.

I'll probably keep watching, especially as episode two has Mary Beard in it, but it's not as promising an opening as I was expecting.

It’s been absolutely panned in every review I’ve read. We watched the first episode last night, and though, yes, it does weave about quite a bit, and I think we jumped about 40,000 years forwards at one point, it is full of pretty things, and I like pretty things. I saw a whole collection of the fertility goddesses at the British Museum once and they absolutely hit me hard as just something so POWERFUL. I can’t explsin it, but I think it must have been a similar surge of feeling something meaningful that people sense when they think they e had a religious experience.

We’ll stick with it too, despite the clumsiness. I don’t think it deserves the absolute panning it’s getting. I love the Kenneth Clarke original, but it’s certsinly problematic from its single western male viewpoint, especially in light of being a colonial power through much of the history it was covering in art.

I do miss the long wandering shots of nothing whilst Clarke gets completely comfortable in his seat or adjusts his trousers in silence like an old school teacher expecting you to wait in silent reverence that he has arrived.

I missed it when it was first shown last year, but BBC4's 'Timewatch Guide' to the British Empire is a good look at how attitudes to imperalism as portrayed on TV have changed over the years.

I watched the second one yesterday over the Iplayer and really enjoyed it. Unlike the opener there was definitely more of an argument and thread to the 'essay'. Mary Beard does poke a little bit of fun at Lord Clarke in it, but that's good. Discussions about art should be a conversation.



I love it when that happens. My guilty secret is that I tend to find galleries boring (music and architecture are always more my thing), but once I realised it was better to go around aimlessly and find something that grabs you, rather than dutifully looking at each picture in each room and reading all the labels, I started to get a heck of a lot more out of these trips.

I remember being really grabbed in the Louvre by a large mosaic from the court of King Darius. Saw the Mona Lisa from a distance, as the crowds were more interesting than the portrait. Wasn't expecting to be so blown away by the 'Raft of the Medusa', given that I've seen it in prints many times and it's a key part of a Julian Barnes book, but hey, I was.

I must dig out my 'Ascent of Man' DVDs and re-watch that, thinking about it.

I agree with your sensibility. Good art should have a visceral reaction and I mosey around most exhibitions waiting for something to chime in this way. I go to a lot of exhibitions and I'm a member of the Tate. A lot of exhibitions in my view are ruined by tenuous, sometimes nebulous curation. Though some fun can be had reading between the lines of what the curator notes say and what I think.

Indeed. I was with the kids in Port Sunlight over half-term and this sculpture entranced me...

It was stunning. I think I stood in front of her for about 10 minutes.

Woah, that's big.

Now you know how other people feel.

https://twitter.com/LegionFX/status/971 ... 48/video/1

April 3rd for the new season - cannot wait !

Yeeeessssssss!

Did anyone see that Geordie fella serve up a fucking Chicken Parmo on Masterchef last night? Ballsy move!

The parmos I used to have in my uni days were the size of pizza box and covered in chips and garlic sauce. A long, long way from the fancy fare normally served up on Masterchef. Fucking delicious when drunk and possibly deadly for those with weak constitutions.

I don’t know what a chicken parmigiana is, so I googled it. I still can’t tell from Hoohle image search, but look at this weird little suggested image search doodah! I have never seen that.

Take a chicken breast, hammer it flat, coat it in breadcrumbs and deep fry. Serve with bechamel sauce and lashings of cheddar cheese. Sides include 'chippy' chips, 'chippy' salad and kebab meat.

Best served at 3am on Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough.

It's schnitzel, but with chicken instead of the more Germanic veal or pork. It's not like "thin cutlet of meat, breaded and fried" is a particularly obscure culinary concept. I've made chicken parmigiana (usually served with spaghetti and marinara sauce, it's an Italian-American staple) a number of times. BBC Good Food has recipes: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/126 ... parmigiana

If parmo is always with bechamel that suggests it's distinct from the US version

I'd argue that's only a minor variation, given the Americans melt mozzarella over it.

Yeah, it was introduced to the North East by an Italian immigrant. The elegant origins have been hammered and deep fried out of it long, long ago.

I was very surprised that none of the chef judges or hosts had heard of it, even in it's original form.

Strongly suspect they were pretending to be shocked because they thought it would make better TV.

You really think someone would do that? Go on TV and lie to the British public? Shame on you

NOT FORGIVING THEY SWAPPED THE DOGS

Minor variation? Serve me a lasagne made with ricotta instead of bechamel and let's see how minor the damage is.

I reckon you'd damage both. Heavily.

Mozzarella > ricotta though.

I recently discovered that ricotta in lasagne is an Italian thing, and not an American blasphemy as I thought.

I’d like to imagine there are varieties of ricotta, some of which are far creamier than the so tart all it’s missing is a vicar as a partner in crime stuff you normally come across. Also, imagine Lasagne with cucina mozzarella!

We watched the first two episodes of The End Of The F***ing World on Netflix. 20 minutes long because it’s channel 4, so were probably an hour long with adverts. It’s a bit like Bates Motel and Skins mashed together. I think the 20 minute episodes could be about 7-8 minutes long if you took out all of the long shots of James and Alyssa sitting awkwardly side by side staring straight ahead. The rest is 100% swearing. The Vision is in it as James’ dad. This concludes my review.

It's brilliant.

I have loved the first two episodes of the show but not got round to watching the rest.

Great soundtrack too.

And the lead character looks just like Declan McKenna.

I was enjoying the third episode of 'Civilisations' with Simon Schama talking about landscape painting, but obviously there was something annoying about his odd pronunciation of certain words because about halfway through my TV set went bang, the house lights dimmed, and it's now buggered. Gah.

The inclusion of the sphinx in the opening sequence makes me think of Cunk's 'Moments of Wonder', which probably wasn't the intention.

Just watched the first episode of BBC Northern Ireland's 'Soft Border Patrol', a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the brave men and women protecting the border between the UK and the EU in our happy Brexit future.

It's a very charming show in the tradition of highlighting the absurdities of petty officials' working lives. The cast are very likeable, and portrayed as believing they are making a difference. In the one I saw, there were several very good scenarioes, of which my favourite being the lady worried about Ebola entering Ulster. Definitely going to keep watching.

Two thirds of the way through 'Civilisations' and I'm now painfully aware that I was so wrong about it in my initial post. It's been some of the best and most thought-provoking telly I've seen this year.

I've just finished David Olusoga's episode on what happens to art when cultures meet. He picks up on details which are, now they're explained, so obvious but I wouldn't have noticed had I just seen the pieces myself.

I still have some gripes: there's an overuse of clever-clever soft-focus for all but the main feature of an establishing shot, and the camera isn't lingering on the works nearly half as long enough to enjoy them fully, but yeah, it's a worthy sequel.

I'm watching it in parallel with a rewatch of the original and it's also quite fun to see where the programmes deliberately collide with Timelord Clark's original, such as over iconclasm in Ely Catherdal which Mary Beard has a very different take on.

I completely forgot we were about four episodes into this!!

I'm now taking the opening episode as an extended trailer. I've not rewatched it yet - I'll wait until I've finished and let things simmer, but I don't think it's as good a start as the scary Viking ship in the original which is still horrifying when you're not expecting it (and always reminds me of 'The Curse of Fenric' with the 7th Doctor).

Russell watched the opening of the original about seven times and fell asleep every single viewing.

His voice is so soothing. I do know all about the mother hanging out the window as the ship goes down the Seine though, as it's now emblazoned on my subconsciousness.

This guy is my new hero. His eyebrows should have their own show. Today he sung a three minute song about diarrhoea and was so happy throughout that it made you want to have a tummy bug just so you could catch that vibe.

Be happy! Be healthy! And get well soon!

He’s awesome. I’ve only just seen it yesterday, but I am already in love with the happiest Doctor Eyebrows ever.

I miss Throughsilver.

I almost said I thought Throughsilver had a new gig but wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t misremembering what he looked like.